XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

At 9:46 AM -0800 11/13/03, Wolfgang Hoschek wrote:
> In d22, could we please also make the following method public:
>
>         private static Node convert(org.w3c.dom.Node node)
>
> If it is not made public, all user code that gets handed an 
> arbitrary dom node must duplicate what is in that method.

What's your use case? I remember there was a reason I didn't do that, 
though it escapes me at the moment. I think it may have been that 
this method doesn't actually handle all types of DOM nodes. For 
instance it does not handle Document nodes. That could be fixed, but 
more importantly DOM allows implementations to create new node types. 
I've seen this at least once, in an XPath or XSLT API I think (DOM 
Level 3 XPath? Yes, that's it. See 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-DOM-Level-3-XPath-20030331/xpath.html#XPathNamespace) 
and there's no way I can plausibly handle all the custom Node types 
one might encounter.

I could just throw an exception if I encounter an unexpected node 
type, but I'd rather not do that until someone demonstrates a real 
need for this functionality. The use cases I've heard so far just 
involved individual Elements and Attrs. I threw in the other types 
out of a sense of completeness, but so far I haven't heard a use-case 
for converting arbitrary nodes.
--

  Elliotte Rusty Harold
  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
  Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
  http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA