

Re: MoRe: Iterating -- Yes it is confusing

From: <keshlam@us.ibm.com>
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1998 13:03:44 -0400
To: www-dom@w3.org
Message-ID: <85256652.005D1495.00@us.ibm.com>
Re whether a document is flat or not: Let's not get hung up on semantics.
The DOM is certainly a tree model. Whether its external representation is
flat or not is _entirely_ up to the particular tool... to take one example,
a wordprocessor based on the DOM could read and/or write anything from HTML
to postscript to plaintext.

Whether "piecewise XML" is a single DOM tree or not is also up to the tool.
It could maintain several DOMs, or merge them, depending on its needs.

As I read the spec, the DOM itself is _not_ intended to be persistant,
though specific implementations of it may be. It's strictly an API which
can be used to manipulate data structures whose representation impelements
this standard. How the documents get into and out of those structures is
outside the DOM's scope.

(I think the introduction to the Working Draft does make this tolerably
Received on Friday, 31 July 1998 14:18:55 GMT
