[XML-SIG] IPC7 results

Lars Marius Garshol larsga@ifi.uio.no
17 Nov 1998 19:15:36 +0100


* Greg Stein
| 
| I very much agree. At IPC7, we noted that the WebDAV protocol
| *requires* namespaces, [...] Since there are several Python projects
| that are based on these protocols, then it is quite a necessity to
| have namespace support.

If it is a necessity then I guess we'll just have to go ahead and do
it. 

I think the best way would be to make a SAX ParserFilter that does
the namespace processing. When I say ParserFilter I'm thinking of
something like the ParserFilters John Cowan made for Java-SAX. It
would simply be a SAX DocumentHandler that rode on the back of other
SAX parsers pretending to be a SAX parser to its clients.

I already have code for doing some of these things in xmlproc (it's
not used, but it's there). I can move it out into a filter and add a
sketch of what's missing as well as making a sketch of the filters.
 
| Regarding the DOM: it should be possible to just attach a namespace
| URI attribute to each node and attribute object. Since just having
| the information available doesn't immediately imply the client will
| check it, the possibility of hiding nodes/attrs is quite
| interesting...

One way to do this might be to have a DOM extension module that used
the factories to sneak in objects with the extra namespace attribute
and extra methods for handling the objects.  This module could also
extend the builders to work with the filter.

FYI: One can do an equivalent of this already with xmlarch. Just use
xmlarch as a set of filters (one for each of your architectures) and
you can build DOM trees from the filtered events for eacharchitecture.
This requires no programming beyond setting up the filters, just some
PIs and #FIXED attributes in your document and DTD.

--Lars M.