- From: Joseph Kesselman <keshlam@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 08:58:14 -0400
- To: Michael Amster <mamster@webeasy.com>
- Cc: www-dom@w3.org
>1. We have a prefix without a namespace URI declaration I don't know whether the lastest draft, which includes an algorithm sketch, was made available to the public. If so, that gives you a detailed answer (though not quite a correct one; we've tweaked it slightly.) In brief: If you have a prefix on a node, by definition that was a namespace-aware node and also has a namespace URI. We take that as implying a declaration, and normalizeNamespace will create the appropriate namespace declaration attribute at "a reasonable place" -- probably locally, to simplify the algorithm and to agree with the behavior that serialization (the save part of load/save) will want to use to resolve the same situation. >2. How do we handle ambiguous nodes Remember, namespace-aware nodes are bound to a namespace (though not necessarily a prefix) at the time they are created, so a node's semantic role and "expanded name" (namespace/localname pair) can never be ambiguioius. Which prefix we should assert for it may be ambiguous if if the user left the prefix blank, but that means they don't have a preference and any in-scope prefix which is bound to that URI is acceptable. Note that we haven't yet firmly decided whether the DOM is going to nail down a specific algorithm or simply require that implementations pick one of the several approaches which will generate XML documents having the correct semantics. We're reluctantly leaning toward the former, largely to ease implementation of XML signatures and the like which may be sensitive to exactly where the namespace was declared and with which prefix. > How far along is the Xerces reference implementation? Of this operation? Given that I've published a proposed algorithm, implementing it would be fairly trivial. Given that we're changing that algorithm, and that it's subject to further evolution as we continue to run testcases against it, I suspect they're waiting for us to stabilize a bit more. I have no idea what the state of Xerces is; ask them and/or offer to get involved -- it _is_ an open source project, after all. (I've occasionally provided code and comments to that project, but I'm not currently deeply involved in it; my "day job" when I'm not doing standards work currently focuses primarily on Xalan.) ______________________________________ Joe Kesselman / IBM Research
Received on Thursday, 26 April 2001 08:59:13 UTC