XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

At 8:16 PM -0600 3/22/04, Bradley S. Huffman wrote:

I understand what happens. This is not an unconscious decision. John 
Cowan, Laurent Bihanic and I talked this out at great length on the 
list about a year and a half ago. See 
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/xom-interest/2002-September/000110.html

> Which just hits me a violation of the principle of least surprise. I just
> cann't help but think if using StringReader is inobvious to a good many
> users then this will really confuse them.

We weren't convinced that this was an ideal solution. It's definitely 
a borderline case. However, we came down on the side of the current 
behavior. Our judgement was that users would not expect a node moved 
from one document to another to have a different base URI than its 
containing document unless a base URI had been explicitly set.

If you can tip the scales in the other direction and convince me base 
URIs should survive detachment, that decision may change. As I said 
we weren't confident in our decision. It was more like 55/45. Perhaps 
you can think of something we didn't then. A really good use case 
would be helpful. Perhaps XInclude could provide one. Currently 
XInclude resolution has to explicitly set all the base URIs on the 
resolved documents. In your approach this would be automatic.

However, do be sure to also consider the case of nodes with no 
explicit base URI created in one document and then moved to a 
different document. I think this is what finally convinced me not to 
preseve base URIs in this situation.

> However, I not sure what should be done. Should Builder call setBaseURI for
> every element (right now it only calls setBaseURI on the document node)?

I think the more likely approach would be to set the base URI only 
when detaching rather than when first creating the element.
--

  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