****************************************************************************** Extensions of the XML specification ****************************************************************************** ============================================================================== This document ============================================================================== This parser has some options extending the XML specification. Here, the options are explained. ============================================================================== Optional declarations instead of mandatory declarations ============================================================================== The XML spec demands that elements, notations, and attributes must be declared. However, there are sometimes situations where a different rule would be better: If there is a declaration, the actual instance of the element type, notation reference or attribute must match the pattern of the declaration; but if the declaration is missing, a reasonable default declaration should be assumed. I have an example that seems to be typical: The inclusion of HTML into a meta language. Imagine you have defined some type of "generator" or other tool working with HTML fragments, and your document contains two types of elements: The generating elements (with a name like "gen:xxx"), and the object elements which are HTML. As HTML is still evolving, you do not want to declare the HTML elements; the HTML fragments should be treated as well-formed XML fragments. In contrast to this, the elements of the generator should be declared and validated because you can more easily detect errors. The following two processing instructions can be included into the DTD: - <?pxp:dtd optional-element-and-notation-declarations?> References to unknown element types and notations no longer cause an error. The element may contain everything, but it must be still well-formed. It may have arbitrary attributes, and every attribute is treated as an #IMPLIED CDATA attribute. - <?pxp:dtd optional-attribute-declarations elements="x y ..."?> References to unknown attributes inside one of the enumerated elements no longer cause an error. Such an attribute is treated as an #IMPLIED CDATA attribute. If there are several "optional-attribute-declarations" PIs, they are all interpreted (implicitly merged). ============================================================================== Normalized namespace prefixes ============================================================================== The XML standard refers to names within namespaces as expanded names. This is simply the pair (namespace_uri, localname); the namespace prefix is not included in the expanded name. PXP does not support expanded names, but it does support namespaces. However, it uses a model that is slightly different from the usual representation of names in namespaces: Instead of removing the namespace prefixes and converting the names into expanded names, PXP prefers it to normalize the namespace prefixes used in a document, i.e. the prefixes are transformed such that they refer uniquely to namespaces. The following text is valid XML: <x:a xmlns:x="namespace1"> <x:a xmlns:x="namespace2"> </x:a> </x:a> The first element has the expanded name (namespace1,a) while the second element has the expanded name (namespace2,a); so the elements have different types. As already pointed out, PXP does not support the expanded names directly. Alternatively, the XML text is transformed while it is being parsed such that the prefixes become unique. In this example, the transformed text would read: <x:a xmlns:x="namespace1"> <x1:a xmlns:x1="namespace2"> </x1:a> </x:a> From a programmers point of view, this transformation has the advantage that you need not to deal with pairs when comparing names, as all names are still simple strings: here, "x:a", and "x1:a". However, the transformation seems to be a bit random. Why not "y:a" instead of "x1:a"? The answer is that PXP allows the programmer to control the transformation: You can simply demand that namespace1 must use the normalized prefix "x", and namespace2 must use "y". The declaration which normalized prefix to use can be programmed (by setting the namespace_manager object), and it can be included into the DTD: <?pxp:dtd namespace prefix="x" uri="namespace1"?> <?pxp:dtd namespace prefix="y" uri="namespace2"?> There is another advantage of using normalized prefixes: You can safely refer to them in DTDs. For example, you could declare the two elements as <!ELEMENT x:a (y:a)> <!ELEMENT y:a ANY> These declarations are applicable even if the XML text uses different prefixes, because PXP normalizes any prefixes for namespace1 or namespace2 to the preferred prefixes "x" and "y". Since PXP-1.1.95, the namespace support has been extended. In addition to prefix normalization, the parser now also stores the scoping structure of the namespaces (in the namespace_scope objects). More or less, this means that the parser remembers which elements have which "xmlns" attributes. There are two important applications of this feature: First, it is now possible to look up the namespace URI when only the original, non-normalized namespace prefix is known. A number of XML standards, e.g. XSchema, use namespace prefixes within data nodes. Of course, these prefixes are not normalized by PXP, but simply remain as they are when the XML text is parsed. To get the URI of such a prefix p in the context of node n, just call n # namespace_scope # uri_of_display_prefix p In PXP terminology, the non-normalized prefixes are now called "display prefixes". The other application is that it is now even possible to retrieve the original "display" prefix of node names, e.g. n # display_prefix returns it. However, the display prefix is only guessed in the sense that when there are several prefixes bound to the same URI, one of the prefixes may be taken. For instance, in <x:a xmlns:x="sample" xmlns:y="sample"/> both "x" and "y" are bound to the same URI "sample", and the display_prefix method selects now one of the prefixes at random. It is now even possible to output the parsed XML text with original namespace structure: The "display" method outputs XML text where the namespaces are declared as in the original XML text. Regarding the "xmlns" attributes, PXP treats them in a very special way. It is not only allowed not to declare them in the DTD, such declarations would be even not applied to the actual "xmlns" attributes. For example, it is not possible to declare a default value for "xmlns:x", as in <ATTLIST ... xmlns:x CDATA "mynamespaceuri"> The default value would be ignored. Furthermore, it is not possible to declare "xmlns" attributes as being required - validation will always fail even if the "xmlns" attribute is present. The model behind this treatment is defined by the "XML information set" standard. There are two kinds of attributes: normal attributes, and namespace attributes. PXP validates only normal attributes.
