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DOM Level 3, more or less flexible than AS?

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: DOM Level 3, more or less flexible than AS?
• From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
• Date: 24 Oct 2002 15:58:32 +0200

Hi,

I'd like to react to what seems to be a common opinion and has been
recently expressed by Elliotte Rusty Harold on Cafe con Leche
(http://www.cafeconleche.org/):

"The W3C DOM Working Group has a new working draft of Document Object
Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification. The biggest new feature in this
release seems to be support for providing type information for
attributes and elements. DTD types are provided for attributes. Schema
types are provided for both elements and attributes. Unlike the recently
killed abstract schemas effort, the approach taken (just provide a type
name and URI for each node) seems much more extensible and much less
tied to particular schema languages. I think this is a clear case of
doing something better by doing less."

If we go back to DOM AS, the idea (as I understand it) was to completely
hide the schema system and rely on a query/request mechanism (the
application would just have asked to the AS if such and such update
could be done).

IMO, this blackbox approach is the most generic API we can imagine and
it could virtually cope with any kind of "schema" system, including
Relax NG, Schematron or even one's own application.

By contrast, accepting the idea that an element or an attribute must
have a "type" seems to be a step backward.

Relax NG doesn't impose this (and doesn't guarantee to report type
information consitently in all the cases) and Schematron has no
"built-in" notion of type either.

Furthermore, I don't see how you can implement rules like Schematron
does so well with a type and a URI.

I think that we are moving from a concept which could have been amended
to support any type of schema and constraint to a concept which at the
end of the day might be more complex and is narrow minded and very
specific to the DTDs and W3C XML Schema approaches!

Eric
-- 
See you in Baltimore.
                                    http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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