Proceedings

Abstract:

It's been 7 years and three "levels" since the first W3C DOM activity. XML and the way it is used has changed vastly over that time. DOM itself has

moved from an API to access and manipulate an in-memory tree with no

concept of namespaces, to an end to end XML technology, where parsing,

modification of the tree (with the ability to check for validity with a

schema as you go) and serialization are all specified.

At the other end of the spectrum, SAX has scarcely changed since moving

into the world of namespaces in 2000. A few extensions have been added and

very recently formalized, after nearly two years of a seemingly endless

beta, but other aspects of the evolution of XML technology have appeared to

have simply passed SAX by.

Now that the W3C DOM activity is coming to a formal close and SAX seems to have stopped for all intent and purposes, this Town Hall aims to look at the benefits and problems that these APIs have provided us with. In

particular, we will look at whether DOM really is a cross platform and language API, if DOM has got too big and covers too much, or conversely, not enough, and whether continued development on this, or a similar standard would be useful to the community.

We will also focus on if there is a future for a push-based event API

in modern XML parsing, or whether there needs to be more focus on

standardizing and extending pull-based API's, as well as whether

the multiple data models specified by the myriad of XML standards

are required, or whether more consideration should be paid to

interoperability to prevent the half-hacked solutions that companies

have created to build wrappers for the different XML views. The latest round of DOM specs delve into the XML Schema and XPath worlds, and this will only exacerbate this situation.