[jdom-interest] Thoughts on...

[Brett McLaughlin]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Bentley" <gb at opengroup.org>
To: "Jochen Kirn" <J.Kirn at gmx.de>; <jdom-interest at jdom.org>
Sent: Friday, March 16, 2001 5:15 AM
Subject: RE: [jdom-interest] Thoughts on...


> What a minute...I thought we are writing Java not C or C++ where forcing
the
> complier to place a value into another context is prevalent...and quite
> acceptable...
>
> Adding "" + to the front of all my values is adding a level of obfuscation
> that I don't want and that shouldn't be encouraged.
>
> I can't believe that people can't see the usefulness behind this...the
> discussions so far seem to be very centered on a visual inspection of the
> data.
>
> I would even go as far as saying that Element really should only allow the
> operations below and that the XMLOutputter should then convert the value
to
> a string since it's only then that it's relevant for it to become
> "readable".  When a document is then read in, it is up to the application
to
> determine what base types it wants to use, i.e. the reader would read
> everything in as a String and the application would perform any
conversions.
>
> Consider, a Document is designed to be a Java representation of any
> document, not just XML and not just for visual purposes, for JDOM to be

Actualy, this is the biggest problem in your argument. a Document is NOT
designed to be a representation of a non-XML document. It's very clearly
stated in our goals that we are aimed solely at XML now, and probably in the
future. We're not trying to provide a generic document model, but a
XML-specific one. That may clear up a lot of things...

-Brett