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Doubts regarding XSL and DOM


Subject: Doubts regarding XSL and DOM
From: keshlam@xxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 1998 19:18:41 -0500

That's an implementation detail for the XSL processor, right? XSL doesn't
_have_ to use the Document Object Model as a back-end; an implementation
could use its own internal representation instead. Even if it is DOM based,
the implementation might subclass the DOM to add features specifically to
support this processor, such as additional query mechanisms.

Level 1 of the DOM doesn't support very sophisicated searching, though that
might be added in Level 2 and the DOM developers are aware of XSL as one
application that might want to use them. If you want to write a DOM-based
XSL parser right now, you're probably going to have to use some combination
of getElementsByTagName, your own iterators, and explicit navigation and
testing of the DOM tree.


(I do think that the DOM is a good back-end representation for an XSL
processor; among other things, that makes retargeting the processor from
one source of XML to another relatively easy. And I suspect that browsers
which support XSL will work that way. But I don't think there's any way to
guarantee that, and the XSL user probably doesn't need to know this
detail.)


______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research
Unless stated otherwise, all opinions are solely those of the author.



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