The W3C DOM Working Group has released new Working Drafts of Document Object Model (DOM)
Level 3 Core Specification and Document Object Model (DOM)
Level 3 Abstract Schemas and Load and Save Specification.
The Level 3 Core builds on the work done in the DOM Level 2 Core, which
became a W3C Recommendation in late 2000.
Unfortunately, the Core specification lacks a convenient listing of
changes from DOM Level 2, however a quick scan shows the following additions
and changes:
- Initial work on combining various DOMs (SVG, HTML, MathML, etc.) into a
seamless whole.
- Alignment with XML Infoset.
- Introducing validation concepts in conjunction with Abstract Schemas and
Load and Save.
- Access to the encoding of an XML document.
- Additional methods to examine and manipulate namespaces.
A companion specification deals with "Abstract Schemas", which
can be DTDs, XML Schemas, or potentially other schema languages. The
document comments on the motivation for this feature, which was considered a
requirement even before the development of XML Schema:
In the October 9, 1997 DOM requirements document, the following
appeared: "There will be a way to determine the presence of a DTD. There
will be a way to add, remove, and change declarations in the underlying DTD
(if available). There will be a way to test conformance of all or part of
the given document against a DTD (if available)."
The "Load and Save" chapter provides an API for loading XML
documents into a DOM representation and for saving a DOM representation as a
XML document.
Comments on both of these documents are invited and are to be sent to the
public mailing list www-dom@w3.org. An archive is available online.