[Q] How should SAX support Namespaces?

[David Megginson]

How should SAX support namespaces?  I can think of three options:

1. Simply ignore them, and require the XML application to do the work
   (all of the necessary information is passed on by SAX).

2. Use the current interface, but allow namespace-aware SAX processors
   to prepend namespace URIs to element type and attribute names, as in

   startElement("urn:www.megginson.com:doc", ...)
   endElement("urn:www.megginson.com:doc", ...)

3. Revised org.xml.sax.AttributeList and org.xml.sax.DocumentHandler
   to include the namespace as a separate (possibly-null) argument:

   startElement("urn:www.megginson.com", "doc", ...)
   endElement("urn:www.megginson.com", "doc", ...)

Given that many major XML-based standards (RDF, XSL, etc.) plan to
use namespaces, it probably doesn't make sense to offload the work to
the application as implied by #1, so the best choices would be #2 or
#3.  I would be very interested in hearing opinions, especially (but
not exclusively) from people who have implemented SAX on either the
parser or the application side.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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