From: Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@...>
Date: 2002-06-01T19:23:59+09:00
Subject: Re: [REXML] Looking for XPath testers

Sean Russell wrote:


> Namespaces are supported, but only on the default namespaces.  IE,
> 
>         d = Document.new("<a x='foo'><b/><x:b/></a>")
>         xpath.match( d, '//x:b' )
> 
> will only return the second 'b' element, as it should, but there is as yet 
> no mechanism for remapping the namespaces.


For documents that I din't create I don't know which prefix stands for 
which Namespace. So I read in a doc, and I know there are elements of 
the namespace [URI], and I need to match those, then the (existing) 
mechanism matching them via the URI is important (prefixes are very 
irrelevant for the namespace concept; they are a just a lowlevel 
shorthand mechanism, where some string stands for a longer string. Any 
prefix string can be chosen for a given URI). Currently, I can declare 
my own prefix-URI mapping for my XPath queries (this shouldn't remap any 
of the document's declarations; does it?), and thus match elements&attrs 
by namespace URI. It is important that this will be available in the new 
imlementation.
(I also want to be able to create elements of a namespace given by a 
URI, and REXML should generate the NS declarations and prefixes when 
serializing this to a document. Big wish :) )

BTW "default namespaces" stands for stuff that's declared like 
xmlns="URI" instead of xmlns:foo="URI".

Tobi

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