Don’t call me DOM

A growing number of W3C groups are in the process of developing JavaScript APIs: the HTML Working Group, the Web Applications Working Group, the SVG Working Group, the Geolocation Working Group, and the newly created Device APIs and Policy Working Group of which I am one of the Staff Contacts.

The Web Applications Working Group has been developing a common IDL format to define these APIs, called WebIDL, which basically takes the OMG IDL format and extend it to make it more useful and informative in the context of JavaScript APIs.

I have just reported the bug in the w3c-dtd-xhtml Ubuntu package that had prevented me from using the Apache XML Catalog resolver to use local XHTML DTDs rather than the on-line ones when using the Saxon XSLT processor.

Hitting the on-line DTDs on every invokation of Saxon unnecessarily burdens the W3C Web site. I had already found guidance on how to use the Apache XML Catalog resolver to avoid that, but it wouldn’t work with the default XML catalog list provided by Ubuntu in /etc/xml/catalog for the XHTML DTDs.

As I was trying to validate a large number of XHTML MP 1.2 files (the ones in one of the OMA’s XHTML MP test suite – whose welcome page itself ironically is not well-formed), I realized that the tool I was using, based on the WDG HTML validator as packaged by Debian, was making network access requests when used on these XHTML MP 1.2 files. I then moved to use xmllint with the --valid option, but it had the same behavior.

As one of the W3C Systems team member, I’m acutely aware how bad is the practice of fetching DTDs over the network over and over again.