[XML-SIG] Ugh! Why are DOM access methods spelled with a leading '_'?

[Martijn Faassen]

Paul Prescod wrote:

Answers from my perspective (MetaKit DOM, also Zope):

> Attributes:
> 	* arguably more Pythonic (=easier to use)

Agreed, though possibly harder to deal with security-wise.

> 	* faster for non-computed attributes

In MetaKit DOM, all attributes are stored in the MetaKit backend. So
for my particular DOM implementation this argument doesn't hold.

> 	* slower for computed attributes
> 	* more like Javascript, VB and COM-like languages (C# :) )
> 
> Methods:
> 	* slower for non-computed attributes

In the case of MetaKit dom this argument does not apply.

> 	* faster for computed attributes
> 	* harder to implement

I really don't understand this. Methods are really far easier to
implement than computed attributes!

> 	* more like Java

   * Easier to supply existing objects with DOM interface.

> There are no killer arguments here, just different weights applied to
> the various features. I don't think that we are going to agree to break
> code today. Maybe later we'll see that there are more DOM implementors
> than clients and their ease of implementation will take precedence.

Here's another one. :)

Anyway, I already implemented computed attributes through __getattr__()
(roughly following 4DOM, though I read in this thread they changed this
later). In my case it's not a huge problem, as my python objects are
basically proxies on top of the underlying database (so I don't have to
integrate with existing objects, like you'd want to do in Zope).

Regards,

Martijn