Re: [xml-dev] Interoperability [long]

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

> - The DOM WG naively believed a literal reading of the namespace spec and
> treats prefixes as mere syntax sugar and URIs as the "real thing".  This
> causes problems when interoperating with specs that treat prefixes as being
> significant.

Huh?  The DOM spec preserves both.  I don't follow.  Since it
preserves both, what's the problem?  Implementation bugs?


> - Elements created with a namespace URI may not have a prefix, and you may
> have to invent one when you need one, e.g., when serializing.

Yeah, but  I remember constantly getting "writing XML from DOM is
out of scope" whenever I raised similar issues.  That's why it's rather
important not to put such things prematurely out of scope ... :)


> - since DOM nodes don't intrinsically know their namespace (unlike XPath
> nodes, as I understand it), the namespace of a node when moved around in the
> tree may change in undesireable ways unless you take lots of care to make
> sure that it is in the same namespace scope in the source and target
> locations, or that you *intended* to make that HTML <p> element a <p>
> element in the "foo" namespace ....

Now I'm totally confused.  Since when is that true?  DOM nodes must
be created with namesepaces, which stick to them like glue.  Moving a
node around doesn't change the namespace URI, or add one.

There was a discussion when DOM first got namespace support, and
I seem to recall one vendor insisting on that "early binding" approach
rather than matching the "late binding" approach that'd match XML text
better ...

- Dave