[Q] How should SAX support Namespaces?

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* David Megginson
|
| 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", ...)

I think this is the way to go, but perhaps it would be better to use 
an object that encapsulates all the information about a namespace and 
then pass that object as the first parameter instead?

Something like this:

  public interface Namespace {
    String getURI();
    String getPrefix();
    String getSchemaURL();
    String toString(); // Convenience alias for getURI()
  }
 
If we require the same Namespace object to be passed for every
occurrence of a construct in that Namespace this is also efficient,
both in terms of parameter construction and namespace comparison.
Implementations will have to map the namespace prefix to an object
anyway, the only difference will be the type of said object.

I also agree with Ron that there should be a namespace declaration
callback. Supporting alternative 1 for backward compatibility seems
difficult to me.

--Lars M.


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