[XML-SIG] Element.localName, Attr.localName

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Mike Brown writes:
 > I personally feel that under no circumstances does an XML document
 > have any status with respect to namespaces; being conformant to the
 > namespaces rec just makes namespace-aware processing a possibility,
 > not a requirement ...  not only because of the way the specs are
 > layered, but also because of the fact that the document has no way
 > of unambiguously saying "I must be processed in a
 > [non-]namespace-aware manner".

I keep meaning to get back to this conversation (since I started it),
but hadn't come up with a good way to say what you just said.  I agree
with this.  Thanks for describing this so clearly!

 > Therefore, it is up to the architect of the processing system to
 > ensure that documents are processed in the manner that is
 > appropriate for their system's documents. This means that if one
 > needs to be able to disable namespace-aware processing, then they'd
 > better not be using minidom. Minidom is under no obligation to
 > support non-namespace-aware processing. [so we are in agreement] :)

Ah, but here I disagree.  minidom should support namespace-unaware
processing, primarily because it is *the* DOM that is shipped as part
of the Python standard library, and most simple applications of XML
are namespace unaware (which is more reasonable than expecting them to
become namespace aware).  I consider this a substantial requirement.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation