XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Wolfgang Hoschek <whoschek AT lbl.gov>]

> * What is the role of a Document (it is much less central than in  
> W3C).
> Obviously it holds the prolog, etc.

In DOM a Document acts as factory, in XOM it doesn't.

> I note that it cannot be detached
> from its rootElement. (I sometimes need to replace a rootElement with
> its child, and this seems to be forbidden without copying the tree.

It works via child.detach(), followed by doc.setRootElement(child).
This ends up detaching the former root element. Moving nodes around  
is easier in XOM than in DOM.

> * Is is possible to serialize a Node other than document without  
> making
> a copy?

You can subclass Serializer go gain access to its protected methods  
such as writeNode().
Note, however that if you are using namespaces, you may (or may not)  
be in trouble as
the XOM Serializer assumes that an entire document is written, rather  
than arbitrary
subtrees. Thus, when serializing arbitrary nodes it can potentially  
"forget" to output namespace declarations, resulting in malformed  
output.
(I have a Nux ResultSequenceSerializer.write(Nodes) that works around  
those potential problems without requiring copying, though it's not  
yet released.)

Wolfgang.