SAX2/Java: Towards a final form

Henry S. Thompson ht at cogsci.ed.ac.uk
Mon Jan 10 16:47:20 GMT 2000


David Megginson <david at megginson.com> writes:

> Henry S. Thompson writes:
> 
>  > Just so there is no possible confusion arising from the overhang of
>  > the namespaces&attributes threads of the last few weeks, please
>  > confirm that
>  > 
>  >   a) getURI should return the empty string iff getRawName returns a string
>  >      without a colon;
> 
> No, because getRawName() may return null if the SAX2 driver does not
> support reporting raw names (i.e. if it is iterating over a database
> where there are no raw XML 1.0 element names to deal with).  
> 
> There is also the possibility that there will be a SAX feature to ask
> the XMLReader to place all unprefixed attribute names into the parent
> element's Namespace at user option (the default will be to leave them
> distinct).

Thanks for the speedy and careful reply.

For the record, I oppose provision of the possible feature described
above.  I think it's clear that for what is designed as a low-level
XML interface, this goes against the intentions of the Namespace REC,
and strictly contradicts its normative statements wrt the default
namespace (see [1], "the default namespace does not apply to attribute
names"), and would lead to two attributes with the same
fully-qualified name in the case of the second <good...> below

   <!-- http://www.w3.org is bound to n1 and is the default -->
  <x xmlns:n1="http://www.w3.org" 
     xmlns="http://www.w3.org" >
    <good a="1"     b="2" />
    <good a="1"     n1:a="2" />
  </x>

(taken from the same section of the Namespace REC), which in turn
would render e.g. GetValue("http://www.w3.org","a") incoherent wrt
that second <good...> if the feature you suggest is turned on.

ht

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/#uniqAttrs
-- 
  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
     2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
	    Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht at cogsci.ed.ac.uk
		     URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/

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