[XML-SIG] Re: [DO-SIG] Python language bidning January 2000 Draft

[Paul Prescod]

"Fred L. Drake, Jr." wrote:
> 
> Looking at the IDL used by DOM, it looks like the W3C don't intend it
> to be used with CORBA. 

They wanted to use a formalism. They didn't want to invent a formalism
merely because invention is more work than stealing. They did not intend
the formalism to depend on CORBA implementation or semantics.

The DOM is inherently "flexible" in ways that make blind inter-language
interoperability unlikely or impossible to start with. It's a template.
A set of ideas. A portable pattern.

Standards are important but they are only important insofar as the buy
interoperability. Slavish conformance to the IDL or to the CORBA mapping
does not (as far as I know) buy interoperability because, as far as I
know, hardly anyone is sending DOM methods over CORBA. Let's not even
think too hard about the performance problems involved there.

So let's design for the market we know we have (Python programmers who
want an easy API) and not the market that I don't think we have (people
who want to use Python DOMs from other languages and other language DOMs
from Python). Interoperability among Python DOMs is enough. Bridges to
Java and Microsoft COM DOMs would also be useful (and easy to write).

-- 
 Paul Prescod - Not encumbered by corporate consensus
"If I say something, yet it does not fill you with the immediate
burning desire to voluntarily show it to everyone you know, well then,
it's probably not all that important."
    - http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/