XML and namespaces

[and-google at doxdesk.com]

Uche <uche.ogbuji at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course.  Minidom implements level 2 (thus the "NS" at the end of the
> method name), which means that its APIs should all be namespace aware.
> The bug is that writexml() and thus toxml() are not so.

Not exactly a bug - DOM Level 2 Core 1.1.8p2 explicitly leaves
namespace fixup at the mercy of the application. It's only standardised
as a DOM feature in Level 3, which minidom does not yet claim to
support. It would be a nice feature to add, but it's not entirely
trivial to implement, especially when you can serialize a partial DOM
tree.

Additionally, it might have some compatibility problems with apps that
don't expect namespace declarations to automagically appear. For
example, perhaps, an app dealing with HTML that doesn't want spare
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" declarations appearing in every
snippet of serialized output.

So it should probably be optional. In DOM Level 3 (and pxdom) there's a
DOMConfiguration parameter 'namespaces' to control it; perhaps for
minidom an argument to toxml() might be best?

-- 
And Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/