[jdom-interest] Namespace inheritance after cloning

[Elliotte Harold]

Eric VERGNAUD wrote:


> Don't enter this subject Alistair, it's in the "pragmatic programmers
> against ayatollahs" area.
> 

This is a crock. There is no conflict here. What you call the ayatollah 
approach is the pragmatic one. Making namespaces change depending on 
where an element was placed in a document or which document it was 
placed in would be hard to use, fragile, brittle, and confusing. It 
would make code extremely hard to maintain and debug, and extremely 
slow, even in the rare cases where it wasn't actively wrong. This 
approach would cause far more problems than it solves, and sooner rather 
than later.

The problem is not that there is too much overhead to supporting two 
approaches. The problem is that one of the approaches (letting namespace 
URIs change depending on element position) is flat-out wrong. It is 
actively contrary to how namespaces are supposed to work in XML.

I agree that the namespace syntax and scoping in XML is excessively 
confusing. This is hardly the only problem it causes. However, it is not 
JDOM's place to "fix" the brokenness of namespaces. JDOM's namespace 
handling is simply correct. It is substantially more correct than DOM's. 
  If you are getting confused when using namespaces with JDOM, then that 
is because you are confused about namespaces; and it is better that you 
detect and correct your confusion sooner rather than later. JDOM helps 
you do that. There is no upside to enabling developers' mistaken beliefs 
about namespaces. A good API makes it easy to do things the right way 
and hard to impossible to do things the wrong way; and this is exactly 
what JDOM is doing.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim