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Re: JAXP's ID Transform failing to include namespace declarat

• To: Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@r...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: JAXP's ID Transform failing to include namespace declaration attributes
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 22:41:05 -0500
• In-reply-to: <3C3A4DD2.C78383A4@r...>
• References: <ZWTPSRNIE946WQA5LJN53WFCGA.3c3a3b3d@MChamp><3C3A4DD2.C78383A4@r...>

At 5:39 PM -0800 1/7/02, Ronald Bourret wrote:
>Maybe I haven't been reading this thread (or the DOM spec) closely
>enough. Is this saying that DOM 2 doesn't automatically insert namespace
>declarations as needed? That is, users have to add xmlns attributes by
>hand?
>

Correct, DOM does not do that. When creating an element in the 
http://www.foo.com/ namespace, DOM2 does not add an 
xmlns="http://www.foo.com/" in the right place to make this work. 
Section 1.1.8 states:

As far as the DOM is concerned, special attributes used for declaring 
XML namespaces are still exposed and can be manipulated just like any 
other attribute. However, nodes are permanently bound to namespace 
URIs as they get created. Consequently, moving a node within a 
document, using the DOM, in no case results in a change of its 
namespace prefix or namespace URI. Similarly, creating a node with a 
namespace prefix and namespace URI, or changing the namespace prefix 
of a node, does not result in any addition, removal, or modification 
of any special attributes for declaring the appropriate XML 
namespaces. Namespace validation is not enforced; the DOM application 
is responsible. In particular, since the mapping between prefixes and 
namespace URIs is not enforced, in general, the resulting document 
cannot be serialized naively. For example, applications may have to 
declare every namespace in use when serializing a document.

In other words, what should happen is that any code that moves DOM to 
some other model such as SAX, XPath, or a text file should insert the 
necessary namespace declarations. What actually does happen though, 
is that such code often neglects to insert them, thus requiring users 
to add the attributes in DOM manually.  This is a big honking mess.

It gets even nastier when you consider the possibility of namespaces 
being in scope on things other than element and attribute names, 
since DOM really can't keep track of these at all.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
|              http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/              |
|   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/   |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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• Follow-Ups:
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• References:
  • Re: RE: JAXP's ID Transform failing to include namespace declaration attributes
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
  • Re: JAXP's ID Transform failing to include namespace declaration attributes
    • From: Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@r...>

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