Re: More namespaces perversion

james anderson (James.Anderson@mecomnet.de)
Wed, 07 Oct 1998 17:57:56 +0000


Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>
> The thing that's killing me at present is this:
>
> having read in an XML document to JUMBO2, edited it in some way, how to I
> add namespaces awareness to thew output. I have to decide where it's
> required (i.e. analyse the potential scoping, have a table of current
> namespaces, and make sure I don't have prefix clashes). None of it's rocket
> science, but all the little bits add up to a large amount of frustration.

if one were to intern the names into packages as they are read, then no
lexical analysis is needed at the point where the document is written.

each package gets a unique name when it is introduced (at the first uri-prefix
binding). prefix bindings for all packages present within a document are
output "somewhere" at the document beginning. if the document has been
constructed, then, depending on ones element storage, although a tree walk may
be necessary, lexical analysis is not. the prefix bindings use the unique
names, as do the qualified names in the document body.

this is the power of packages and interned symbols. it's a better
representation of the "namespace problem" than individual name/uri pairs.