V-DOM and P-XML - Towards a Valid Programming of XML-Based Applications

Many WWW applications generate HTML or XML documents dynamically. Current tools, however, like languages using 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 DTD. Each class extends the Element-class of the Document Object Model (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.