Proposal for bootstrapable DOM and CSSOM

To: www-dom, xsl-list, www-style

Good morning,

As many readers of the W3C public forums do, we strongly believe that
the DOM is one of the major improvements of the document's world and we
would like to propose possible extensions of the actual W3C standards
(and activities) that would, in our opinion, make things move forward
in an even more powerful direction.

First of all, we would like to see a bootstrapable DOM. In other words,
we would like to be able to describe the DOM itself in a XML document
conformant to a DTD. DOM level 1 Core could be described by one XML doc,
DOM level 1 core+html by another one, and so on. It not yet clear to us
if all the DOM can be bootstrapable or if a core is has to be
determined.
About the DTD itself and how it can be built, our second suggestion
just below makes a proposal.

Secondly, and because that description of the DOM will obviously need
XSLT, we would like to see a meta-circularity of the couple DOM+XSLT.
The DOM could be described in a XML document with XSLT inside and XSLT
could be (obviously...) described using the DOM. That way, the
coherence of these so important W3C recs can be achieved. Some other
people could say that DOM and XSLT are then provable...

Last point, we believe that CSS then needs a XML representation. Please
do not read that we propose to XMLize CSS and drop the actual CSS
formalism. We just propose to be build an isomorphism between the
actual CSS and a fully XMLized representation of the same data. Then
the CSSOM can also be bootstrapable, meta-circular and provable...

We believe that such mechanisms could dramatically increase the
eXtensibility of the DOM, XSLT and CSS, and the implementability of the
new versions of these W3C standards. From our user's point of view,
something highly desireable if software solutions take advantage of
that and appear faster on our desks ;-)

Claude Bahloul and Daniel Glazman
Electricité de France


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