XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

At 5:35 PM -0700 7/17/03, Wolfgang Hoschek wrote:


> What's the reason the DOMConverter.convert(xyz) methods are private?
> It would be handy for my app to be able to convert a DOM element 
> into a XOM element, without going through the trouble of making new 
> documents and passing them to the public methods that work on entire 
> documents.

You can't create a DOM element without creating  DOM document, at 
least not within DOM. In DOM every element has a document object, and 
cannot be disassociated from that document. I suppose it might be 
possible to change a single DOM element to a single XOM element, but 
the reverse is not possible, within the limits of DOM. (You could use 
implementation specific classes, but it's ugly and non-portable, and 
generally breaks every time the DOM vendor updates their 
implementation.) How are you getting elements without documents 
anyway?

That said, if you've got a convincing use case, I could see exposing 
some of the DOM-->XOM methods directly, though XOM-->DOM will have to 
remain private for these reasons.
--

  Elliotte Rusty Harold
  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
  Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
  http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA