DOM and Grove

[schen at falconwing.com]

Hi Paul, everyone,

On Sat, 9 Oct 1999, Paul Prescod wrote:

[ ... ]
> The real reason groves were invented was
> to answer the question:
> 
>  * what is the result of hyperlinking into an arbitrary media type?
[ ... ]
> You cannot build a sophisticated hypertext system without answering that
> question. This will become apparent after XLink, XPointer and RDF are
> implemented. We'll start to see many divergences of behavior when links
> are made into (e.g.) PDF, MPEGs, JPEGs and so forth. Over time we will
> need to develop a framework for describing the correct results of links
> in a generic way. Then we will reinvent groves.

I am just learning about groves now and am interested in your claim.
There's a note in the Property Set Requirements annex of the HyTime
specification:

NOTE 440 Property sets are designed to support the HyTime and DSSSL
processing and representation of notation-specific data by providing the
information needed by those processes. They are not intended as a general
model for making notation-specific data available for arbitrary
processing.

But you're saying that we should be able to use groves for other
arbitrarily structured data?  I guess I can see that in a way, but I would
like to see example groves of things like relational databases?

Has anyone attempted to define a subset of ESIS for XML yet?  I'm very
interested in seeing something like that, along with a corresponding
grove plan for XPath's (and therefore XSLT and XPointer/XLink's) data
model.

Having just struggled through the abomination that is the DOM Level 1 in
order to attempt to implement XPath, I can definitely see a need for
XML processing using efficient, tailored data models produced for each
kind of processing, and maybe groves are it.

If there's nothing like this yet I would like to collaborate with any
other interested parties in defining an XML property set and XPath grove
plan, and perhaps also a Java implementation for grove manipulation.

. . . Sean.



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