Re: Usage of null

I'm not sure I'm following your question.

Node.nodeValue may be either an empty string or null, depending on the node
in question. For example,  Element and Document nodes have no nodeValue,
and return null. Text nodes may be empty, and hence may return an empty
string. Similarly,  a null Namespace URI is significantly different from a
blank Namespace URI -- the latter is namespace-ill-formed, the former is
just a node which has not been assigned to a namespace.

If the language/binding conventions that you're working with don't
intrinsically support null, it's the responsibility of whoever designs that
set of bindings to come up with an equivalent. Whether that's a specific
string value (presumably one that would otherwise be illlegal in XML), or a
specific string object (if your system lets you compare objects for
identity and treats strings as objects) seems to be their choice.

I don't know a great deal about CORBA, but if sequence<unsigned short>
doesn't support null, maybe it  simply isn't the best datatype to directly
bind as DOMString.

______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research

Received on Tuesday, 19 September 2000 08:58:39 UTC