Re: [xml] Namespace declaration parent, doc: also broken?

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 04:51:17PM -0500, Anthony Carrico wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 12:18:26PM +0800, William M. Brack wrote:
> > Perhaps you could elaborate?
>
> I can see from the C documentation link you provided that the parent
> and document references aren't available. I was mislead by the Python
> binding's class structure where xmlNode is a superclass of xmlNs.
>
> As for the philosophical point, I can get the parent of an attribute,
> so why not a namespace declaration? Both are defined on a particular
> element, right?

  Right, let's say it's historical. I have tried to keep the xmlNs
nodes small, I should probably have modified them too to add navigation
informations like on other node types, in retrospective it was an error
but I can't really change it in a clean way now.

> For my code, the practical issue boils down to memory managment. As
> you probably know, Python's gc doesn't extend to libxml2
> nodes. Sometimes I would like a function to return a lone namespace
> declaration (or an attribute, an element, etc.). This requires
> creating a temporary document to hold it. I wish the client could
> always use the node itself to access the temporary document to free
> it, but I guess a special case is currently necessary for xmlNs.
>
> The application is a functional xml library for Python which has
> import/export support for libxml2 (and uses libxml2 for parsing,
> serialization, RelaxNG, etc.). In this case, ironically, "functional"
> means that the Python elements don't have parent pointers. Temporary
> documents seem to be necessary for libxml2 export of any non-document
> node. Hopefully that explains why I might want the document reference
> to be available.

  There must be a misunderstanding on my part. What is the relevance
of building a document to print a namespace node in isolation, namespaces
must be within an element, so the element context should be used, 
I can't follow your reasoning there. You can't put an xmlNs node as
the child of a document node.
  So in any case adding a parent link instead of a document link sounds
far more generic, no ?

Daniel

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