The Peace Process: DOM and namespaces...

[Tyler Baker]

David Megginson wrote:

> Rick Ross writes:
>
> [about preprocessing namespaces for the DOM]
>
>  > Doesn't that presume that a "document" exists?
>
> Preprocess your information, whatever its source.

>From an entire database.  Pass over the entire document tree and prepreprocess everything
before actually presenting it to the application.  This is not practical.  In my limited
experience on these matters I have seen this tried before and with horrendous results.
Nevertheless, it does not take a computer scientist to see the real world problem with this
approach.

>  > There should not be a requirement for the data to get emitted as
>  > XML, just so it can be reparsed - the XML-implied DOM
>  > representation would suffice beautifully if not for this namespace
>  > problem.
>
> I cannot understand why you would have to do this.

There is a big difference between "having to do something" and doing something because it
makes perfect sense from a real world perspective.  Preprocessing the entire source tree just
do handle namespaces hardly makes a case for supporting namespaces at all in a product.  You
can have the most elaborate features in the world for an application but if they don't work in
the real-world problem domains of real people, then they are pretty useless no matter what
their original intentions were.  "Namespaces in XML" and the hacked up manner in which you
need to deal with them in XML is a prime example of a specification not realistically trying
to solve the problems of its target audience.

Tyler


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