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Re: SAX2: Namespace Processing and NSUtils helper class

• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• To: XMLDev list <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2000 12:00:44 -0800

At 11:45 AM 1/5/00 -0800, David Brownell wrote:
>Tim pointed out the spec only allows a null URI in the case of the
>default namespace declaration:  xmlns="".  

And when you're doing this, you're saying that there is *no* default
namespace, not that the default namespace is "".  

Pardon for flogging this possibly-dead horse, but you have to read the 
text of the namespace spec carefully to realise that you just can't ever 
have a namespace URI whose value is "".  We should have put in a sentence 
in section 5.2 saying "Note that as a consequence of this rule, it is not 
possible to have a namespace whose value is the empty string."

As a consequence of this, I have suggested that in SAX2, we use ""
to represent the absence of a namespace rather than null.  Then you'll
always be able to do 

 if (ns.equals(myNamespace))

rather than

 if ((ns != null) && ns.equals(myNamespace))

 -Tim


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