Namespace Dom

This namespace declares the collection of abstract classes, designed to express two related XML document models. The first model is the Document Object Model (DOM) as specified by DOM Level 1. The second, proprietary model is called Extended Document Model (XDM) and is designed mainly to support document processing specified by XPath and XSLT.

These two document models use different approach to the namespace handling. In DOM, namespaces are represented as ordinary attribute nodes. In XDM, namespaces are represented as nodes of the special namespace node type; furhtermore, every element node has the individual list of namespace nodes which represent all namespaces declared on this element node, together with the default namespace (if any) and the implicit "xml:" namespace. The XDM was introduced due to the fundamental incompatibility between DOM and document model required by XPath and XSLT.

It is assumed, that for each document there is specified, which of these two document models is used to handle the document structure. The particular node supports XDM extensions if XDM is the object model used to handle content of the owner document of this node. The user of this API is adviced to employ DOM whenever this is possible; use of XDM should be reserved for implementation of algorithms based on XPath or XSLT document processing model.

It is important to note, that this namespace declares abstract classes that express abstract interfaces. It is assumed that multiple implementations of these interfaces can exist. The particular implementations for these interfaces are declared in the separate namespaces (see, for instance, the namespace BasicDom defined in this Toolkit).

The DOMString interface defined by DOM is represented by CString class. Null string values are represented as empty CString strings.

The Document Object Model (Level 1) is described in Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 Specification .

Since:

1.00.00

Version:

1.00.00

Author:

Alexey Gokhberg