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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] SAX survey: expected local name for non-namespace qualifiedelements
Hello,
Recently I raised some issues about inconsistencies in the SAX
documentation with regard to how local names are reported to the
startElement() method:
public void startElement(java.lang.String uri,
java.lang.String localName,
java.lang.String qName,
Attributes atts)
throws SAXException
Specifically the question is, when namespace processing is turned on
as it is by default (i.e. when http://xml.org/sax/features/namespaces
is true), is it acceptable for a parser to report the local name of a
non-namespace qualified element as the empty string? For example,
consider this document with no namespaces:
<document>
<para>
Hello!
</para>
<document>
When a parser calls startElement() or endElement() for these
elements, is it allowed to report their local names as the empty
string, and only provide the name as the qName argument? Or must it
report the local names as "document" and "para"?
David Brownell, the current maintainer of SAX, surprised me by
claiming that it is OK to report the local names as the empty string
for non-qualified elements even when the namespaces feature is true.
He says that such elements do not have local names.
I've checked with 4 existing parsers (Xerces-2, Piccolo, Crimson in
JDK 1.4, and Oracle 9.0.2.0.2) and they all report the actual name as
the local name argument. The SAX documentation is contradictory on
this point. The infoset clearly states that non-namespace qualified
elements do have local names, but the infoset is not normative for
SAX.
Here is the question:
1. Before now, what was your understanding of this point? When
writing and teaching did you tell your students to rely on local
names or qNames for non-namespace qualified elements? What have you
relied on in your code?
2. If you've implemented a parser, what does your parser do?
3. If you participated in the original specification of SAX2 back in
1999/2000 what were you thinking about this then?
Note that the question is *not* what SAX should do now. The question
is what was people's understanding of this point so that going
forward we can be clearer about what is and is not conformant, and so
that we can all write interoperable code. I'm trying to understand as
much as possible what the original intent of SAX2 was, and I'm hoping
that we don't discover that 50% of people understood it one way and
50% understood it the opposite way, though that's certainly possible.
I've cc'd this to various people who have been involved in SAX in one
way or another, as well as posting it to the sax-devel, xerces-j-dev,
and xml-dev mailing lists. Discussion should probably take place on
sax-devel <http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sax-devel>,
but it will where it will. Thanks for your input.
If you'd like to read the original exchange that led to this question
see http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/13179/0/ and start
with the first post on "misleading sentence on project page"
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
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