RE: [xml-dev] Interoperability [long]

["Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Hutchison [mailto:hutch@xampl.com]
> Sent: Friday, November 16, 2001 8:03 AM
> To: Champion, Mike; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Interoperability [long]
> 

> 
> Care to expand on this? I cannot tell if you are being 
> serious or ironic

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. 

Time will tell, a better conceptualization will probably evolve, and in the
meantime, if you are careful and don't assume that various XML-related
implementations will somehow do the right thing without being explicitly
told, you'll be fine.