Re: Re;: NSXMLParser on GS (was Re: Books / GNUStep / XML)

[Helge Hess]

On Oct 18, 2004, at 23:42, Marcus Müller wrote:
> Last time I checked Apple's implementation (around 6 months ago)  
> namespace support was broken,
...
> Anyhow the general API of NSXMLParser isn't bad at all and a working  
> GS implementation in base would be desirable IMO.

Incorrect ;-)

AFAIK the namespace support is just fine according to the API. The  
issue is that the _API_ doesn't (explicitly) support namespaced  
attributes, well, at least it doesn't document how this is supposed to  
work.
---snip---
- (void)parser:(NSXMLParser *)parser didStartElement:(NSString  
*)elementName
 namespaceURI:(NSString *)namespaceURI qualifiedName:(NSString  
*)qualifiedName
 attributes:(NSDictionary *)attributeDict
---snap---
As you can see attributes are passed in as a NSDictionary. I assume  
(and this is how it is implemented in Cocoa) that the key of the dict  
is the attribute name and the value the attribute value. Yet with  
"namespace names" have name/uri/qname and this (important) information  
is lost.

There are various options for making this work with the current API  
("{nsuri}value" keys or array keys or special object key), but until  
Apple shows us the way, we can't have interoperability (and therefore  
cannot use NSXMLParser for XML documents with namespaces [= most XML  
stuff today]).

BTW: in SAX there is a special object for that issue, SaxAttributes:
   
http://svn.opengroupware.org/viewcvs/trunk/sope-xml/SaxObjC/ 
SaxAttributes.h?rev=33&root=SOPE&view=auto

Greets,
  Helge
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