Proposal: Removing the WebCGMText interface from our DOM

[Benoit Bezaire <benoit@itedo.com>]

Hi,

We (Itedo developers) have been questioning the usefulness of the
WebCGMText interface for some time...

We've been wondering why the XML DOM includes such an elaborated
Text/Character Data interface, see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407/core.html#ID-1312295772

The explanation I was able to find is as follows "The DOM
implementation may not put arbitrary limits on the amount of data that
may be stored in a CharacterData node. However, implementation limits
may mean that the entirety of a node's data may not fit into a single
DOMString. In such cases, the user may call substringData to retrieve
the data in appropriately sized pieces."

First, we don't really believe that fitting a node's data into a
DOMString to be a problem for WebCGM use cases (applyCompanion file).
Second, our WebCGMText interface doesn't include the methods that
would seem advantageous regarding memory management, below is our
WebCGMText interface:

interface WebCGMText: WebCGMNode {
  readonly attribute WebCGMString   data;
  readonly attribute unsigned long  length;
};

I believe we have two options:
1) Add more functionality to the WebCGMText interface so that long
data strings can easily be handled by implementers and script writers.

or
2) Remove the WebCGMText interface since WebCGMNode.nodeValue is
equivalent to WebCGMText.data.

Our suggestion is Option 2, removal of WebCGMText. We don't think that
the benefits of a complex WebCGMText interface is worth the
development effort.

Thoughts?

-- 
 Benoit                 mailto:benoit@itedo.com