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Re: The Peace Process: DOM and namespaces...

• From: Tyler Baker <tyler@i...>
• To: David Megginson <david@m...>
• Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 18:38:38 -0500

David Megginson wrote:

> Tyler Baker writes:
>
>  > Then the document is illegal.
>
> How?  The DOM view of the document does not affect the document itself.

The DOM has an unstated implication that it reflects a valid XML document.  If you make a call
to getNodeName() on an Element node, it is expected to return a valid XML name.

>  > Namespaces can essentially be any set of characters you want.  When
>  > you replace the prefix with a namespace, you are creating an
>  > illegal XML Name as you already stated.  Should the DOM reflect a
>  > legal XML document or should the DOM allow anything you want to
>  > serve as element and attribute names.
>
> The physical representation of an XML document (as defined by XML 1.0)
> is not allowed to have characters like '/' and '@' in element and
> attribute name, but the DOM is not a physical representation; it is an
> API providing access to one view of a document's information set, and
> as such, it is not governed by the Name production in XML 1.0.

This is one way of looking at it.  But this is not clear and there is no mechanism defined to
tell an application whether the DOM is using these illegal names or not.  If you write the DOM
Document back out to XML, you are writing out illegal names because you don't know if you are
writing out prefixes + local part or namespace + local part.

> There is currently *no* complete specification governing an XML
> document's information set: it would be quite conformant (though
> silly) for the DOM to swap uppercase and lower-case in names, to
> precede every name with "go away or I will taunt you a second time:",
> to randomly rename elements to "Bob", or just about anything else.
>
> The XML 1.0 spec does not even require processors to report element
> names, so in terms of conformance, anything goes kids.

How is anyone supposed to reliably build any sort of architecture on XML if everything is this
ambiguous.

Tyler


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