V-DOM and P-XML—towards a valid programming of XML-based applications

Abstract

Many WWW applications generate hypertext markup language or extensible markup language (XML) documents dynamically. Current tools, however, like languages using document object model (DOM) or JAVA Server Pages do not allow to check the validity of the generated documents statically. Instead, validity has to be ‘checked’ dynamically by appropriate test runs. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a new distinct class for each element type of a document type definition (DTD). Each class extends the Element-class of the DOM. The resulting object model is called validating DOM (V-DOM). Parametric XML (P-XML) is an extension of XML allowing to insert values of the newly defined classes in places, where the corresponding element types are allowed according to the underlying DTD. Like V-DOM, P-XML guarantees the validity of all XML documents generated by using P-XML. V-DOM and P-XML are illustrated by several examples.