[XML-SIG] Open issues: Namespaces and Unicode

[Fred L. Drake]

A.M. Kuchling writes:
 >      1) Unicode support.  
...
 > is only a coincidence, and won't work on a machine of different
 > endianness.  

  I suspect expat is able to determine endianness and takes care of
byteswapping as needed.

 >      Anyway, we should probably modify at least one of the parsers to
 > handle a wide string.  Pyexpat is probably the best candidate, since
 > the Unicode support is already there in Expat itself.  Does this seem
 > to be a reasonable course of action?  Any volunteers?

  Yes, and no.  ;-)

 >      2) Namespace support.  
...
 > and DOM interfaces.  Unfortunately, no one responsible seems to be
 > defining what namespace support should look like in SAX and DOM.  The
 > plan for SAX might be to use a parser filter that implemented the

  If we can get an agreement as to just what SAX filters are supposed
to look like, I'm willing to do any new coding needed to implement a
namespace handler.  I understand that someone has already done some
work on SAX filters, but SAX itself really needs to define this, and
preferably define the SAX interface in IDL as well.  Let us know if
you get any info from Dave.
  The results of the last call on the Namespace draft should be known
in early January.  We should wait until that's done before worrying
about it much.

 >       There also seems no sign of namespace support for the DOM,
...
 > function or module to do it, knowing that it will probably be made
 > obsolete in the future.  (For example, there might be a
 > do_namespaces() function in xml.dom.utils that walked over a DOM tree
 > looking for xmlns:* attributes and decorated all the nodes with an

  I think a "decorating" function like this would be a sufficient
interim solution.  I would not place it in the Node or Element class
because of the expected obsolescence.
  I'm willing, but for either project (SAX or DOM namespaces), I won't
have time until January.


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.	     <fdrake@acm.org>
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
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