Re: [HtmlUnit] HTML DOM implementation

[Christian S. <chr...@ne...>]

Hello all,

I would like to return to the subject of unifying the internal element 
hierarchies in HtmlUnit, in particular the HtmlElement and Element 
hierarchies.

I am considering to take on this task. Our discussion showed that there 
would be advantages in having the HtmlElement hierarchiy implement the 
w3c.dom interfaces, as this would offer a standard API - in particular 
all XPath implementations will support w3c.dom out of the box.
It would also enable us to simply configure the XML parser with the 
custom DOM implementation and thus have it construct the correct tree 
right away.

I have looked into this, and come to the conclusion that cannibalizing 
an existing DOM implementation (I chose crimson), and subclassing the 
HtmlElements off from there would be the easiest way to go. Of course 
this is still an operation that goes through the internals of HtmlUnit.

To avoid conflicts I would rename the packages of the cannibalized DOM 
implementation into the HtmlUnit namespace.

As I said, I am willing to take this on. Does anyone have 
comments/recommendations/objections? Is there a likelihood that the 
result will be merged back into the code base?

thanks,
Christian