Re: C14N isn't widely used?

Tim Bray wrote:


> I really must go back and ascertain what work would be involved in 
> making Genx do excl-c14n.  -Tim

For genx this would be fairly easy since genx doesn't do document 
subsets, which are where all the real gotchas pop up. However, it's also 
inappropriate for genx to do this. The primary effect would be that you 
couldn't just add a namespace as soon as somebody asked you to. Instead 
you'd have to wait until the namespace prefix was actually used on an 
element or attribute before outputting the corresponding declaration. 
This can royally muck up documents that depend on namespace prefixes in 
element content and attribute values, such as XPath select expressions 
in XSLT stylesheets or xsi:type attributes in instance documents. In the 
extreme case, a prefix the user asked to map would never be declared at 
all in exclusive canonicalization. :-(

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@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