[jdom-interest] Re: First pass at Namespace revision[eg] (Jason Hunter)

[Rosen, Alex]

> > What I think the problem is lies in the difference between
> > the object model and the textual representation.
>
> Yes, somewhat.  Initially (as you probably remember Philip) we had JDOM
> namespaces modeled directly after the textual rep and namespaces were
> 100% inherited from parents.  Then Elliotte (author of O'Reilly's "XML
> in a Nutshell" and IDG's "XML Bible" for those who don't know him) made
> the point that namespaces are intrinsic to an element's
> identity, and we changed models.

I agree with Philip - this sounds like exactly the problem. It's perfectly
natural to think of XML in terms of its textual representation, so that's how
many (most?) people build XML trees. If you "think about it hard enough", you
realize that the current behavior makes sense, but that won't stop people from
thinking about it the other way, and getting confused. The question really is,
do people want to build trees that look like the XML "information set", or that
look like the XML textual representation, right? Either one is a reasonable
choice IMO.

Do you have a pointer to this discussion, so we can read up on it? (i.e. I
wonder if it's time to revisit this decision, so the API is less surprising to
people?)

Alex