At 08:11 AM 12/17/99 -0800, I wrote:
>I think someone's being a bit too careful.  The DOM API absolutely allows you
>to create things that can't be serialized as well-formed XML.  There was
>a lot of discussion of this and it's a deliberate decision, not an accident.
>
>Hmm... there may be some other gotchas in the DOM spec that prevent you
>from emitting *arbitrary* text, e.g. syntax-char escaping.  I'll check.

OK, I checked with my local DOM expert who said:

- if you're creating documents, you're using level 2 DOM, which means
  that the spec's not frozen and if it's getting in the way it can be
  fixed
- at the current time, the createDocument method creates a document
  along with a root element, so if you just serialize that, you're 
  always going to get at least one start-tag & end-tag
- the chair of the DOM WG says that if this is a problem, someone should
  post a convincing use-case to [EMAIL PROTECTED] right now and they'll see
  what they can do

Having said all that, I understand why a DOM implementation might have 
these checks.  It seems very handy to have a facility to check that what I'm 
cooking up really is XML (if I want it to be).  It seems really wrong 
though to have this happen at run-time *as* I add the nodes; slows things 
down and gets in the way.  I'd want those methods to be batch kind of things 
that I can invoke when I'm finished building the doc and before I serialize.
  -Tim

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