The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Monday recommended that the Document Object Model Level 2 (DOM Level 2), a set of objects for representing XML documents and data, is ready for widespread deployment.
By recommending the specification, the W3C is telling the industry that all of its member companies have had the chance to test the technology and it meets their needs.
"The DOM Level 2 builds on top of [existing] functionality and adds to it things that the companies deploying it have been asking for," said Lauren Wood, the DOM Working Group chair, and the director of product technology at SoftQuad Software Ltd. in Toronto.
Included in the latest specification are namespace support, a style sheet platform that adds support for cascading style sheets 1 and 2, a standard model of how objects may be combined, and a standard interface for accessing and manipulating objects.
The DOM interface enables developers to create software plug-ins for processing tag-sets in a language-independent fashion. And a standard API allows programmers to write modules that can be reused across a variety of applications.
The W3C said that as more Web sites move to XML for content delivery, DOM Level 2 will be used for developing dynamic Web content.
"The DOM is already being implemented pretty much anywhere XML is used," Wood said.
Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, to name just a few, all use DOM in XML products.
Other industry players contributing to the W3C DOM Working Group include SoftQuad, Intel, Macromedia, Netscape Communications, Software AG, and Sun Microsystems.
Additional W3C Working Groups are also working on DOM Level 2, which is intended to extend the platform for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and Mathematical Markup Language (MathML).