Re: Why unqualified? (was RE: ANN: SAX Filters for NamespaceProcessing)

[Ronald Bourret <rpbourret@rpbourret.com>]

Sean McGrath wrote:
> >The serialization of objects and structures is a real reason.
> 
> Hmm. Could you give an example?

XML data binding products often generate code for classes from an XML
Schema or vice versa. If you can have unqualified (or even locally
defined) children, then generating an XML Schema from a graph of class
definitions is easy in that you don't have to worry about element name
collisions.

For example, suppose you have two classes:

class foo        class bar
{                {
   int x;           String x;
   int y;           String y;
   bar b;        }
}

The existence of local element types means you can serialize objects
from these classes as:

   <foo>
      <x>...</x>
      <y>...</y>
      <bar>
         <x>...</x>
         <y>...</y>
      </bar>
   </foo>

The problem with local element types is that, once an element of the
type is taken out of its containing element, it can't be identified.
Allowing the child element names to be unqualified just exacerbates
(sp?) the problem.

What I can't understand about both is whether they solve any technical
problems. As far as I can tell, the only problems they solve are
aesthetic, since the objects could just as easily have been serialized
as:

   <foo>
      <foo-x>...</foo-x>
      <foo-y>...</foo-y>
      <bar>
         <bar-x>...</bar-x>
         <bar-y>...</bar-y>
      </bar>
   </foo>

-- Ron