Venue

Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Programming Language Technologies for XML (PLAN-X’08)

Publication Year

2008

Authors

Abstract

The W3C Document Object Model (DOM) specifies an XML update library. DOM is written in English, and is therefore not compositional and not complete. We provide a first step towards a compositional specification of DOM. Unlike DOM, we are able to work with a minimal set of commands and obtain a complete reasoning for straight-line code. Our work transfers O’Hearn, Reynolds and Yang’s local Hoare reasoning for analysing heaps to XML, viewing XML as an in-place memory store as does DOM. In particular, we apply recent work by Calcagno, Gardner and Zarfaty on local Hoare reasoning about a simple tree-update language to DOM, showing that our reasoning scales to DOM. Our reasoning not only formally specifies a significant subset of DOM Core Level 1, but can also be used to verify e.g. invariant properties of simple Javascript programs.

Source Materials