- From: Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake@acm.org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 11:37:15 -0400
- To: Scott Nichol <scottnichol@comcast.net>
- Cc: www-dom@w3.org
Scott Nichol writes: > This regards Node.namespaceURI in the DOM 3 Core. Going back to > DOM 2, this attribute's description has started "The namespace URI > of this node, or null if it is unspecified". To me, this seems > quite clear, and in programming languages like Java, I expect a > null value in that language to be returned. For Python, null is mapped to the None value, which is generally used in Python to indicate "no value". The Python XML-SIG has gone round and round on the issue of whether to use an empty string or None for a missing namespace URI in the DOM, and we finally settled on None since that's really what's intended. > However, there are implementations that do not use what I would > consider to be a null. For example, Oracle's XML parser's > Node.getNamespaceURI() returns an empty (zero-length) string, and > Microsoft's .NET framework (the NamespaceURI property of the > System.Xml.XmlNode class) likewise returns an empty string. This sounds like a serious nuissance in those implementations. But I think the spec spells out clearly that null is the right thing. If that's normally spelled using Java's null value, there's no need to change the specification; the implementations are clearly in violation and bug reports should be filed. -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org> PythonLabs at Zope Corporation
Received on Friday, 25 July 2003 11:37:24 UTC