On Apr 06, 2006, at 01:41, Michael Champion wrote:
> > Any input from this gang of heretical DOM-haters?
>
> Take the poor ol' thing to the vet and put it out of its misery?

No effing way :) I love the stuff. And I'm pretty much most folks in  
the WebAPI WG and our community would agree. Keep in mind that the  
alternatives don't includes the likes of DOM Events, which is a  
crucial piece of the architecture for us.

My question had more to do with dropping OMG IDL compatibility, which  
we're discussing, but since you're back to the DOM, we don't plan on  
doing more in the Core than:

   - simplifying things by moving the interfaces that aren't needed  
in browsers into separate (optional) modules; and
   - perhaps taking care of a few rough edges that experience shows  
folks always get wrong.

> Seriously, DOM-the-standard's only reason to live these days is to  
> make portable browser -- oops, sorry "Web 2.0" -- apps easier to  
> build, right?  E4X seems like the way forward there, not DOM.  What  
> am I missing here?

E4X is a nice way of creating DOM structures, and has some limited  
but very cool navigation features. But it's not a replacement for the  
whole DOM, there's still too much you can't do with it. I would tend  
to expect E4X to become more widespread and be used alongside the  
DOM, but not to replace it.

And something the only reason to live of which is to make portable  
Web apps possible seems to have a use case huge enough to justify its  
existence for many years to come. It's not as if the alternatives  
were very enticing.

> The kindest thing you could do for its users is to not muck with  
> the Recommendation, except maybe to clarify it  *if* the major  
> implementers you care about are at the table  and are committed to  
> implementing the clarifications.

Right now we're only missing one major browser implementer (and we  
hope to see the missing one join us soon), the others tend to be  
pretty much on the same wavelength. If you have specific  
clarifications in mind, don't hesitate to toss them our way.

-- 
Robin Berjon
    Senior Research Scientist
    Expway, http://expway.com/