[XML-SIG] Re: [4suite] Article about XSLT 1.1 and <xsl:script>

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Alexandre Fayolle
| 
| I'm interested in learning how the DOM can be language biased.

The DOM is not biased towards any particular language, but it does
have a strong bias towards a particular family of languages:
mainstream statically typed object-oriented languages. This bias is,
of course, more or less inherited from IDL.

The further away you are from that core family of languages the more
painful you'll find implementing and using the DOM, since its design
will follow a philosophy increasingly distant from that of your
language.

In Python, a mainstream object-oriented language, the pain is not too
great, even though it can be felt. In Common Lisp, an object-oriented
language, it would be felt more strongly. In Haskell, a functional
programming language, the DOM is better ignored. Ditto for Prolog,
Forth and many other languages.

To put it another way the question is not how the DOM can be biased
towards a particular language, but more how it could possibly avoid
such a bias.

--Lars M.