[XML-SIG] DOM API

[Paul Prescod]

I'll have to think about some things more than I have time for right now.
Other stuff:

uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com wrote:
> 
> 
> We might consider this for Namespace support for 4DOM, although we had been
> planning to wait for W3C to jump, so that we could maintain
> standards-compliance.  Right now 4DOM just treats namespaces entirely
> opaquely, i.e. ignores them.  Maybe there is a way to add your above
> suggestions to DOM.Ext.

In response to Greg's comments, I'm starting to think that namespace
processing should be a mode: either completely on or completely off. The
complex, scoped namespaces mechanism is more the result of politics than
technology -- this wasn't how namespaces were supposed to turn out.

> > element.getText: returns a list of deep list of data from the text nodes.
> > Do your own string.join to choose an appropriate join character.
> 
> I'm not sure how useful this is if we omit the semantics of 
> nested elements.

Actually, it gets a fair amount of use and is easy to implement. DSSSL,
XSL and the grove paradigm all provide this feature. Consider:

<SECTION>
   <TITLE>This is the <CODE>XSL</CODE> introduction.</TITLE>
...
</SECTION>

Now I'm generating a TOC, index or cross-reference. I don't care abou the
CODE element -- I just want to treat it as if the tags doen't exist.

I could go either way on this function, though.

> I would see more use for a method that simply returns the XML text within an
> element, including nested tags.

That's a different feature that is also useful. 

> > element.getChild("FOO") returns the first child (not descendant) element
> > with specified element type name.
> 
> I've never had a need for such a method.  I often need all such elements, in
> which case I just use getElementsByTagName.

I'm surprised that you've never needed it. In Greg's data-ish world it
would be incredibly useful but also in the data-ish subsets of the
document world.

<DOCUMENT>
 <METADATA>
   <TITLE>Blah...</TITLE>
   <AUTHOR>Blah...</AUTHOR>
 </METADATA>
...
</DOCUMENT>

doc.documentElement.getChild( "METADATA" ).getChild( "AUTHOR" )

You can emulate this with getElementsByTagName but you incur the overhead
of building and discarding the node list.

> > element.getChild( "#PCDATA" ) gets a list of child text nodes.

I've never needed this one, but Greg seems to...we'll let him defend it
(here or in qp_api) when he gets back.

-- 
 Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for only himself
 http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

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