[XML-SIG] Ugh! Why are DOM access methods spelled with a leading '_'?

[Uche Ogbuji]

> Uche Ogbuji wrote:

> Thanks. How would anyone know about this without living in the SIG or
> searching the archives? Obviously they wouldn't.

Agreed that this is not the best.  I've been tooling around with a basic 
document to help rectify.  Don't worry, I haven't addressed the current 
controversial point yet.

> Even after reading these, I don't see a very strong
> consensus. The strongest indication of consensus is in the
> second link you provided, which points to an 
> "unofficial Python binding".

Yes, I considered it unofficial (and still do) because it is not formally 
stated and published.  However, I do think it represented the consensus (I 
hope I've never tried to pass off "consensus" and "official" as the same 
thing).

Paul's point about implementor consensus comes from the fact that both the 
4DOM and PyDOM teams pledged, and soon afterwards effected a change to support 
the dual foo/_get_foo convention.  Note that there were no howls of protest.

You can see in the threads that pretty much everyone ended up liking the 
attribute approach because of its pythonicity, whough there were a few 
mentions of the implementation difficulties you've brought up.

-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
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