XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

Andrew Thompson wrote:

> > I'll add this to the TODO list. I may or may not get to this in 1.1.

A tentative fix is now in CVS. Surprisingly little broke when I added 
it. I am not yet convinced there aren't as yet undiscovered bugs, 
especially since I don't actually parse the URL to try and deduce an 
appropriate relative URL; just use string manipulation.

> Hey, thanks! Not sure what you mean though. It's non-conformant but 
> you're going to make it an option anyway?
> Or do you mean you'll detect this case and just strip it down to 
> xml:base="fragment.xml"?


The latter. xml:base="fragment.xml" conforms to the spec. No xml:base 
attribute does not.

> I guess that more or less solves my problem.
> Actually, what would this mean if I didn't deploy fragment.xml to the 
> web server?
> If an element has xml:base="fragment.xml" what does it imply for 
> relative URIs inside that element if "fragment.xml" does not exist in 
> the deployment filesystem?

Not much. They'd still be resolvable against the parent directory.

> Conceptually to me it's much more useful for relative URIs to end up 
> relative to the final resolved document that to mess around with 
> xml:base trying to make them relative to the original document fragment, 
> which may not even exist! What I mean is, if I merge index.xml and 
> fragment.xml into index.html, then upload only index.html to my 
> webserver, then why would I want URIs relative to fragment.xml or 
> index.xml? To me merging these documents conceptually makes the relative 
> URIs relative to the resulting document.

Au contraire. They really do need to be relative to the original 
document. For instance, let's suppose I have this element:

<xi:include href="http://www.cafeaulait.org/"; />

That document includes a lot of relative URLs that point at other 
documents on http://www.cafeaulait.org/. Including it on 
http://www.example.org/ where those documents do not exist should not 
break the links.  The goal is that a relative URL not change what it 
points to just because an element is included.


--
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim