[jdom-interest] Re: Radical Suggestion (was Re: Antwort: RE: [jdom-interest] Namespace help)

[Alex Rosen]

> This whole thread made it obvious that the developer did not
> understand how namespaces worked in pure XML syntax, in  a plain text
> document, without JDOM anywhere in sight. That's not really his
> fault. Namespaces are a mess. However, since we need to faithfully
> model XML, we need to model that mess. If we can make it easier and
> remain faithful to the namespaces and XML specs, great; but we can't
> do anything that flies in the face of those specs. If a programmer
> has trouble with JDOM because they don't understand namespaces,
> better they encounter cognitive dissonance as quickly as possible so
> they'll fix the flaws in their understanding rather than have JDOM
> reinforce their mistaken ideas.

I think a big problem is that it's easy to confuse the concepts of a
namespace and a namespace declaration. What you see in an XML document is
the namespace declaration, and even if you know how namespaces work it's
easy to space out and think that the parent element has a namespace but the
child doesn't. Pointing this distinction out in a few more places in the
JavaDoc might help.

Alex