XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

At 1:27 PM -0500 3/19/04, jcowan AT reutershealth.com wrote:

> No, I think you have it correct already.  Conceptually, the build()
> multimethod takes two arguments, a source and an optional base URI.
> Currently, the source can be a File, an InputStream, a Reader, a system
> ID (represented as a String), or a String.  Since the last two have
> the same representation, you're forced to make the base URI prohibited
> when the source is a system ID (which is reasonable) and required when
> the source is a String (which is also reasonable, as there is no way to
> deduce the base URI of a String).  There is no obvious reason, though,
> why a base URI can't be set when the source is a File.

My thought is that the File object provides its own base URI. If you 
pass a File object the base URI will be set on the resulting 
document. This isn't true for a plain input stream created from a 
file. Plus, I'd rather not ask the user to specify a file URI if they 
don't really want to change the location. file URIs are very tricky 
and platform dependent, and it's easy to get them wrong. I'm not sure 
the File.toURL() method actually does get them right, but I suspect 
it does a better job than mot users are likely to do by rolling their 
own. Since the most common case is that the base URI is the URI of 
the file itself, that's what XOM supports.
--

  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