XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

At 4:45 PM -0700 9/27/02, O'Brien-Strain, Eamonn wrote:


> -- Sparta does not handle namespaces specially.  But it does the 
> correct thing in the usual case that the same prefix is always used 
> for the same namespace URI.  (The W3C wrapper around Sparta does 
> however implement namespaces properly.)

No, it doesn't. It works in the case where you know the prefix in 
advance. That's not at all the same thing. Using Sparta I can write a 
generic XLink processor that finds all "xlink:href" attributes. 
However, I can't write an XLink processor that finds all attributes 
with the local name "href" and the namespace URI 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/xlink"; regardless of prefix. At least I 
can't without writing my own namespace processing code to layer on 
top of Sparta.

Sparta appears to be an XML 1.0, pre-namespaces API. It basically 
ignores namespaces. They can be treated as normal attributes, and the 
namespace handling logic can be rolled into application code. This is 
essentially the SAX1/DOM1 approach. But that's really painful, which 
is why we have SAX2 and DOM2.
--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| 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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|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
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