DOM: Towards a Formal Specification

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