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Re: Partyin' like it's 1999

• To: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@m...>
• Subject: Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 08:09:39 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <0E36FD96D96FCA4AA8E8F2D199320E520356B516@R...>
• References: <0E36FD96D96FCA4AA8E8F2D199320E520356B516@R...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

Joshua Allen wrote:


> No way for a parser to return a single attribute value without parsing
> all the way to the end of the start tag.  For example, if you have:
> 
> <foo x:id="a" y:id="a" ...insert a bajillion attributes here...
> xmlns:x="foo" xmlns:y="foo">
> 
> You have malformed XML right at the beginning, but the parser doesn't
> know to throw (and cannot even accurately report the first or second
> attribute) until it has parsed a bajillion other attributes first.  Why
> is it allowed for the xmlns to come *after* the first use of the prefix
> anyway (order of attributes doesn't matter, so to hell with perf)


This doesn't arise in practice. It's a corner case. Tool vendors need to 
handle it, but honestly the API complexity of allowing streaming 
attributes argues against this approach, even if it were possible to 
implement.

> What if the xmlns declaration is on an ancestor node, and you call
> .InnerXml on DOM from a child node.  Should the .InnerXml represent the
> text content of the subtree, in which case it would lose the namespace
> decl if written to text, or should it insert an extra xmlns decl?  You
> get into all sorts of crazy situations; dumping entire set of NS decls
> in scope on XSLT output, generating bogus prefixes on output.

InnerXml is an ugly, non-standard Microsoft hack. Eliminate it. Problem 
solved. Don't blame XML for your own mistakes.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

• References:
  • RE: Partyin' like it's 1999
    • From: "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@m...>

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