Effect of DOCTYPE on DocumentBuilder

[Gregory Murphy <Gregory.Murphy@eng.sun.com>]

I'm curious if people think the following behavior makes sense. I'm using
JAXP 1.2, with Xerces 2.4.

Given the following document:

<xc:cursors xmlns:xc="http://docs.sun.com/xmlcursor"/>

If I build a DOM from this document using
javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder, having specified that namespace
processing should take place, the root node reports the following
information:

node.getNodeName() = "xc:cursors"
node.getLocalName() = "cursors"
node.getPrefix() = "xc"
node.getNamespaceURI() = "http://docs.sun.com/xmlcursor";

All good and well. If I add a document type declaration to the same
document, i.e.

<!DOCTYPE xc:cursors>
<xc:cursors xmlns:xc="http://docs.sun.com/xmlcursor";>

the root node data changes to

node.getNodeName() = "xc:cursors"
node.getLocalName() = null
node.getPrefix() = null
node.getNamespaceURI() = null

It's true that namespaces can't be represented per se in a DTD, but that
doesn't mean I can't use them nonetheless in my document, no? Moroever, I
have defined a document type, just declared it.

// Gregory Murphy.  Isopaleocopria.