XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>]

At 9:11 AM -0500 9/20/02, Bradley S. Huffman wrote:
> My reason would be that children have order so previous and next make
> sense. Attributes are unordered so previous and next don't. BTW, I did
> this with a experimental version of JDOM and to me it just wasn't that
> usefull and one method to obtain a List or array of attributes was
> good enough.

I'm in radical agreement that attributes don't have order, and that 
we can't reproduce order from input. However, there are many use 
cases in which you do not know a priori the names of the attributes 
on any given element (XSLT and XInclude to name two). Thus it is 
useful and necessary to retrieve the complete set of attributes from 
an element.

Having done so, you need some means of iterating across this set. 
Currently, I provide this with indexed access, though the JavaDocs 
are careful to say that the index is not significant. Is 
getNextSibling/getPreviousSibling somehow worse than this? Given that 
I don't know the attribute names, is there any way I could provide 
access to all the attributes of an element without somehow imposing 
an external, perhaps arbitrary, order on them?

The only thing I can think of is providing a list of the names, which 
could then be used as indexes into the set of attributes. However, 
that just moves the external, arbitrary order into the list of names. 
It doesn't really address the concern.
--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo AT metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
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