Re: [xml-dev] namespace-unawareness

[Martin Honnen <Martin.Honnen@gmx.de>]

Mike Sokolov wrote:

> Do standard XML tools provide a mechanism for handling XML documents
> containing tags with prefixed names but no corresponding namespace
> declaration? For example, if I'm given a document containing something
> like:
>
> <related-article xlink:href="xxx" />
>
> and the xlink prefix is never declared, should a parser (for example) be
> able to parse this document if it's set up with namespace-aware=false?
> And various followup questions (if so: what is the name of the
> attribute? if not: what is the point of namespace-aware=false)?

I think the Java DOM APIs can handle that:

       DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
       DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
       Document doc = db.parse(new InputSource(
new StringReader("<related-article xlink:href=\"xxx\" />")));
 
System.out.println(doc.getDocumentElement().getAttribute("xlink:href"));

On the other hand I don't think that browsers allow you to build a DOM 
that is not namespace aware. Opera has support for the DOM Level 3 Load 
and Save API but when I try to set the parameter 'namespaces' to false 
on the domConfig of an LSParser it throws a NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR exception. 
Other browsers do not support a configurable parser at all, you can only 
build a namespace aware DOM.



-- 

	Martin Honnen
	http://msmvps.com/blogs/martin_honnen/