XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

Interesting. I'll have to look at this. A couple of things I noticed 
at first glance:

1. XOM handles external entities. Sparta doesn't. This is a big 
difference for some files. Looking at the API, it's not clear what 
happens when you do hit an unresolved entity. Is there any 
representation of this in the tree? or do you just throw it away? or 
throw an exception?

2. According to your web site., "Sparta ignores namespaces. <a:Foo> 
and <b:Foo> are treated as if ":" was a normal tag character. These 
will be considered different tags even though strictly speaking there 
is a possibility that the a: and b: namespace have the same URI. (The 
Thermopylae wrapper does however support namespaces.)"

This is so wrong. It rules Sparta out for so many applications. In 
2003, without namespace support, I have to say an API is DOA. It's 
unclear how you can claim to support any of XPath, since XPath is 
completely dependent on namespaces. XPath, XSLT, XInclude, SVG, RDF, 
Schemas, XHTML, XLink, XQuery, and so many more all depend on 
namespaces.
--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo AT metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
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