[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Interoperability [long]
> Sorry, I was more crabby and obscure than usual yesterday; I had just > returned via a red-eye flight from a DOM WG meeting in which we took yet > another whack at namespace normalization and in matching up the DOM data > model with the XPath data model. The combination of DOM, namespaces, and > XPath is likely to sell quite a bit of Prozac in years to come, I fear. > > In hindsight (and in my personal opinion), the DOM probably should have > tried harder to directly expose the prefix that a node was associated with > when it was created or parsed; the XPath data model is somewhat cleaner in > this regard. On the other hand, by a strict reading of the Namespace spec, > we concluded a couple of years ago that this was un-necessary and > potentially inefficient. Anecdotal story... Folks using Jaxen pretty much *always* get confused the first time they create an XPath like /foo:bar/baz:cheese, and then get nothing selected from their document. There is definitely a lack-of-understanding of how XPath ns-prefixes map to Document ns-prefixes. Since pretty much everything is prefix-oriented, no one realizes that you have to bind prefixes to uris in the context of the XPath itself, not just the document. An example of the prefix-orientedness of the world, many articles and books define the URL for 'xsd' a single time, and then all examples throughout the book only ever use the 'xsd' prefix. Folks get hung up on the prefixes, and forget there's a ns-uri behind the scenes.) Likewise with 'soap' or whatnot. I think the literature, at lease this year and next, could do a better job of emphasizing that the prefix really isn't the data, but the URI-behind-the-prefix is what's important. Prefixes are just syntactic sugar, really. Just my $0.02. -bob
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|