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Re: Vocabulary Combination and optional namespaces

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Vocabulary Combination and optional namespaces
• From: Joe English <jenglish@f...>
• Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 17:24:27 -0700
• In-reply-to: <5.2.0.9.2.20030529181532.03267fb8@s...>
• References: <5.2.0.9.2.20030529181532.03267fb8@s...> <3ED676DF.6020707@p...> <3ED676DF.6020707@p...> <ab7bdvs3gol4j4trlefsiq6g4bfbaou70f@4...> <3ED5B096.9080102@t...> <3ED6062E.4080403@b...>

Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>
> At 02:44 PM 5/29/2003 -0700, Joe English wrote:
> >[...] the nice simple data model of elements, attributes,
> >and text turns into a vastly more complicated data model, where
> >names are <namespace-name,local-name> pairs -- or even worse,
> ><namespace-name,namespace-prefix,local-name> triplets -- instead
> >of atomic strings, and you have to keep track of the namespace
> >environment to serialize or deserialize anything.
>
> There are people who argue that you could just borrow someone else's pain
> and use an off-the-shelf parser with a standard API,

But _are_ there any toolkits that handle namespaces sanely?
I haven't found any yet.  (SXML comes pretty close though).


> but that doesn't
> always work for my tasks - too much gets lost along the way.  Fortunately
> I've now written stacks for handling namespace declarations (and scoped
> attribute values), so the worst of the pain is over, but the smaller
> symptoms linger.

The initial namespace processing seems like the easy part
to me.  It's working with the output of that process that
I find painful, for exactly the reasons listed below:

> It seems like namespaces aimed at diambiguation with the "let's create big
> long names" approach, and then had to abbreviate the big long names to keep
> the language usable.  Since then, we've had datamodels that are big (pairs
> and triples), complex (scoped), and infectious (QNames in attribute and
> element values).

Another model is to just use the big long names; that's
what JDOM and SXML do.  This isn't any more appealing
to me than pairs or triples, though, and the scoping
problems remain.


--Joe English

  jenglish@f...

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination and optional namespaces
    • From: james anderson <james.anderson@s...>
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination and optional namespaces
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination and optional namespaces
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination and optional namespaces
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
  • Vocabulary Combination
    • From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
  • Re: Vocabulary Combination
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Vocabulary Combination and optional namespaces
    • From: Joe Gregorio <joe@b...>

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