Re: DOM Implementation for PHP3

Colin Putney wrote: > > Hi all, > > After a quick scan of the W3C's DOM spec, here are my thoughts on a DOM > Implementation for PHP. I'm not particularly interested in an OCX-based IDE > for PHP, so I'll just ignore that thread... > > The DOM could be implemented as a library of classes written in PHP. This > would be a fairly sizable chunk of code and for performance reasons, it > might be desirable to implement it as pseudo-classes of the kind created by > the dir() function. (I don't know anything about the magic behind that - > anyone care to comment?) > > There would also have to be an input function for parsing out a HTML/XML > document and returning a DOM Document object. This would be the root of the > document tree, which could be manipulated by the script. The modified > document tree could then be passed to a complementary output function which > would traverse the tree and return the resulting HTML. > > For developers of web-based applications (like myself) this would be an > elegant way of separating the processing code from the display code. On the > other hand, I'm not sure that it would be useful enough to make it > worthwhile. Manipulating the document tree would probably take more code > than simply generating the raw HTML, and would likely be significant > overhead. > > On the client side, the DOM is really useful as a standard interface for > DHTML, but on the server side, it seems to be less useful. I may be missing > something though, because the idea is intriguing. Maybe it would be useful > as a higher level API to the XML functions. Something like this has been discussed before, only not in the context of a DOM implementation. Like Thies said, this could make it much easier to work with XML documents and it would make the existing XML extension obsolete. Apache's mod_dav (http://dav.lyra.org/) has functions to build a tree from XML data. It would be cool if we could just use that code and map the structures to PHP. Or we could implement DOM, but that's a lot more work. :-) Anyway, I don't think it would be much useful until PHP4 comes out. Doing this sort of thing with PHP3 is just too painfully slow. - Stig -- PHP Development Mailing List http://www.php.net/ To unsubscribe send an empty message to php-dev-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For help: php-dev-help@lists.php.net