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

[tpassin@home.com]

Jim Fulton wrote -
> Paul Prescod wrote:
> >
> > "Fred L. Drake, Jr." wrote:
> > >
> > > ...
> > >
> > >  > Is there are description somewhere of the Python DOM mapping,
> > >  > other than the DOM sources?
> > >
> > >   The W3C documentation gives the IDL mapping, which requires the
> > > Python specific mapping.
> >
> > Actually, the DOM can be mapped into a language in a manner that does
> > not follow directly from the IDL and CORBA specs. That's why there is a
> > formally defined java binding rather than just a reference to the IDL
> > specs. Historically, though, 4DOM was really a CORBA tool so it really
> > needed to follow the specs.
>
> Whatever we do, there needs to be a document somewhere that
> says what the Python DOM mapping is, even if it is not
> much more than a reference to the DOM IDL and the Python
> binding.
>
 Actually, the W3C DOM standard said that all the bindings were derived from
an underlying XML original:

"As stated earlier, all object definitions are specified in XML. The Java
bindings, OMG IDL bindings, and ECMA Script bindings are all generated
automatically from the XML source code.

This is possible because the information specified in XML is a superset of
what these other syntax need. This is a general observation, and the same
kind of technique can be applied to many other areas: given rich structure,
rich processing and conversion are possible. For Java and OMG IDL, it is
basically just a matter of renaming syntactic keywords; for ECMA Script, the
process is somewhat more involved."

Perhaps if we were starting from scratch again, emphasizing the XML base
instead of CORBA mappings (I assume these were worked out before the XML
work was really off the ground), we'd get a different solution.  It's
probably too late for that since things are pretty far along.  But since the
W3C DOM was not developed in IDL, there would seem to be no strong reason to
be limited by the some particular IDL mapping techinique instead of the
underlying XML.

As I said in my post on this from last November, consistency in naming is
important, which is part of what Jim is getting at too.

Tom Passin