xml-dev - [Q] How should SAX support Namespaces?

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

How should SAX support namespaces?  I can think of three options:

1. Simply ignore them, and require the XML application to do the work
   (all of the necessary information is passed on by SAX).

2. Use the current interface, but allow namespace-aware SAX processors
   to prepend namespace URIs to element type and attribute names, as in

   startElement("urn:www.megginson.com:doc", ...)
   endElement("urn:www.megginson.com:doc", ...)

3. Revised org.xml.sax.AttributeList and org.xml.sax.DocumentHandler
   to include the namespace as a separate (possibly-null) argument:

   startElement("urn:www.megginson.com", "doc", ...)
   endElement("urn:www.megginson.com", "doc", ...)

Given that many major XML-based standards (RDF, XSL, etc.) plan to
use namespaces, it probably doesn't make sense to offload the work to
the application as implied by #1, so the best choices would be #2 or
#3.  I would be very interested in hearing opinions, especially (but
not exclusively) from people who have implemented SAX on either the
parser or the application side.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)