The Peace Process: DOM and namespaces...

[Bill la Forge]

One of the problems with DOM/namespace is the difficulty of manipulating
the tree while tracking namespace scoping. A partially lazy approach seems to work:

1. Do NOT make any namespace transformations while building the tree.
    Instead, propagate the xmlns attributes to all children. (Use the inheritance filter.)

2. Manipulate the tree as desired.

3. Layer additional methods onto the DOM (you can either subclass things or
    use static methods) for accessing the unique name based on the xmlns attributes
    attached to the Element being accessed.

4. When converting from the DOM to SAX events or when creating a document from the
    DOM, drop xmlns attributes which are assigned the same value in the parent element.

OK, it means the application will likely need to be namespace aware to work with
this. 

Overhead may be a bit of an issue, but then it always is when using a DOM.

Bill


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