Re: [HtmlUnit] HTML DOM implementation

[Mike B. <mb...@Ga...>]

Christian Sell wrote:
> 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.

I'm not convinced that there is any significant benefit in this respect. 
  The DOM is already available which means that you can do XPath right now.

There *are* benefits to removing one of the three hierarchies but 
offering a "standard api" isn't one of them IMO.  The proposed change 
would affect just about every part of HtmlUnit so I'm reluctant to 
accept something like this without seeing significant benefits.

The only significant benefit to this proposal that I can see is a 
reduction of objects required to represent one html page in memory.  Am 
I overlooking something?

> I chose crimson

Why crimson?

> Is there a likelihood that the
> result will be merged back into the code base?

If the change does not break backwards compatibility with existing users 
of HtmlUnit and the final result is better in memory usage or ease of 
maintainability then I expect it would be accepted.  If it does require 
breaking backward compatibility then it would depend how serious that 
break was.  Clearly I want to accept patches that make the product 
better but I will be very leery of accepting a patch that makes such 
fundamental changes to the way the product works.  It would have to go 
through a much higher level of regression testing than most changes would.

So the short answer is, yes it would be accepted if I was confident that 
it didn't break anything.  Making me feel confident about such a drastic 
change may be difficult.

-- 
Mike Bowler
Principal, Gargoyle Software Inc.
Voice: (416) 822-0973 | Email  : mb...@Ga...
Fax  : (416) 822-0975 | Website: http://www.GargoyleSoftware.com