Re: 1998-04-20 Pre-Release, with Road Map and Demos

Don Park (donpark@quake.net)
Thu, 23 Apr 1998 00:30:07 -0700

>I think that the chair of the DOM WG, Lauren Wood, reads this list;
>perhaps she can comment or correct any mistake that I might have made
>here.

I sure hope Lauren is reading this list cuz latest DOM spec is pretty hard
to swallow. NodeIterator, for example, has been changed so that current
position lies between two nodes. The concept is neat theoretically but very
hard to implement efficiently in Java. Requiring NodeIterator to iterate
over 'live' data is also making it very difficult to implement. In the face
of these problems, mixing iteration with indexing is not too strange.

The latest DOM spec also retrieves attributes via NodeIterator which makes
it a requirement that Attribute implementations also implement Node
interface.

Overall feeling I get about the latest DOM spec is not too good despite
little improvements like attribute values being strings now.

Hopelessly involved with a Mystic API,

Don Park
http://www.docuverse.com/personal/index.html