XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Laurent Bihanic <laurent.bihanic AT atosorigin.com>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> At 7:26 PM +0100 1/15/03, Laurent Bihanic wrote:
> > What bothers me more here is the behaviour of the methods 
> > getNamespaceDeclarationCount() and getNamespacePrefix(): they do not 
> > give access to the element and attributes namespaces.
>
> I've thought about that. However, the real question is whether these 
> methods should return namespaces in scope or namespaces declared. If 
> it's namespaces in scope, then they need to return ancestor declared 
> namespaces as well the attributes' and element's own namespaces. If it's 
> namespaces declared, it may not include the attributes' and element's 
> own namespaces, depending on whether those namespaces have previously 
> been declared on some ancestor. Right now XOM is in the middle between 
> those two.
>
> I'm really not use what to do. Use-cases might help. Srrialization is 
> the big one. What other use-cases are there, if any, for iterating 
> through all of an element's namespaces? either declared or in-scope or 
> additional?

What I wanted to say is that I'm fine with the current behavior of 
getNamespaceDeclarationCount() and getNamespacePrefix() provided I can 
retrieve *any* namespace that was accepted by declareNamespace().

So, there is a choice either to throw a NamespaceException for any attempt to 
redeclare the namespace of the element or one of its attributes and not change 
getNamespaceDeclarationCount() and getNamespacePrefix() or to silently 
accept/ignore namespace redeclarations but change 
getNamespaceDeclarationCount() and getNamespacePrefix() to allow iterating on 
*all* the namespaces declared at the element level (element namespace, 
attribute namespaces and additional namespaces)

One last question: There is no getNamespacePrefix(String uri) method. Wouldn't 
it be useful? What do I do if I want to add an attribute in a given namespace 
and would like to "reuse" any namespace declaration for the same URI present 
higher up in the document to avoid duplicating declarations for the same URI ?

Laurent