Re: XML API specification

Derek Denny-Brown (ddb@criinc.com)
Wed, 26 Feb 1997 10:12:28 -0800

At 08:49 AM 2/26/97 -0800, you wrote:
>At 10:59 AM 26/02/97 -0500, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>>Quite. I think we can model these objects in a number of ways
>>though. I would personally like to define the objects in IDL
>>*and* SGML... (for information on IDL etc. look at www.omg.org).

I like the idea of fleshing it out in IDL, but providing alternative
interfaces, based on that API (Java Interfaces, OLE **shudder**,
C++, etc) This gives implementers more leeway (i.e. I want a C++ DLL,
because I need raw speed. Others want a Java Interface for protability,
etc... CORBA IDL is a sufficiently general center that an interface in
most any language should be derivable from that base.

>Fortunately, we're not starting from scratch. We have two strawman
>interfaces on the table right now, NXP and Lark. Seems to me that
>since XML is particularly likely to be processed in the client, you
>could do a lot worse than a Java API - the idea of having a
>set of superclasses for Element, Attribute, and so on seems awfully
>desirable to me. [Confession - I've been too busy putting proper
>attribute defaulting in Lark (hard!) to even get around to looking at
>the NXP interface, so I have no comment as to which straw I prefer at
>the moment].

Does anyone have a reference to NXP? It might be useful to actually post a
list of related docs w/ URL's where appropriate (i.e. Java Language Spec,
CORBA IDL spec, NXP, Lark, SP, etc...)

-derek

-- Remember: Computers are here to make our lives easier --
ddb@criinc.com // software-engineer // www/sgml/java/perl/etc.