XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

Michael Kay wrote:


> JAXP chose to pass a namespaced parameter name as a single string in Clark
> notation. Since namespaced parameter names are rather unusual in practice,
> that has the benefit that it adds less clutter to the API. It's not clear
> that you are doing anyone a favour by making a different decision here.

I've always found {http://www.example.org/}name to be an ugly hack 
that's hard to understand, and requires extra work on the part of the 
programmer to construct. Not a lot of extra work, of course; just enough 
to be annoying. Perhaps if this format were part of the namespace 
specification, and baked into things like SAX and XSLT, it would be a 
little more plausible; but since it isn't, I see no reason to use it 
here. Someone coming to XOM should just be able to say "Here's the 
namespace URI, here's the name; here's the value; set this parameter" 
without having to learn about some extra, funky, arbitrary convention. 
Breaking this out as separate arguments means all the programmer has to 
know is the method signature.

As precedent for an API breaking with this convention (that's really 
only a convention in TrAX, not anywhere else) I point to the 
org.apache.xalan.xsltc.trax.TransformerImpl and 
org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl classes:

http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/apidocs/org/apache/xalan/xsltc/trax/TransformerImpl.html
http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/apidocs/org/apache/xalan/transformer/TransformerImpl.html


--
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
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