Comments on: PHP Trivia Contest: DOM + Default Namespaces

By: StephenB

StephenB — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:48:03 +0000

xmlns is not the prefix name. It is the default namespace identifier. Which in case of the default namespace has an empty prefix. So getAttributeNS(â€™http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/â€™,â€) would work, as it should. If the namespace was xmlns:prefix then correctly, ‘prefix’ would be the argument to getAttributeNS.

The php5 DOM implementation is a leap over php4 and I’m looking forward to namespace implementation in php5.3+ & php6.

Not perfect though, Just logged a bug for createAttributeNS.
S

By: David Sklar

David Sklar — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 17:15:09 +0000

Ooh, that’s kooky. I can see why getAttributeNS(â€™http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/â€™,”) works over ‘xmlns’ as the second argument — if ‘xmlns’ is the “namespace prefix”, as it is obviously with something like xmlns:pants=”http://whatever/”. you’d want to call getAttributeNS(â€™http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/â€™,’pants’), but the special case of prefix-but-no-localname is weird.

By: Adam Trachtenberg

Adam Trachtenberg — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 15:51:31 +0000

Yea, XPath is cheating. That’s why I called out getAttributeNS().

But you’re close enough, as:

getAttributeNS(â€™http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/â€™,”)

Does work. However, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to. :)

By: David Sklar

David Sklar — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 02:10:30 +0000

I suppose it’s cheating to suggest:

[code]
$xpath = new DOMXPath($xml);
echo $xpath->query('/*[local-name(.)="r"]')->item(0)->namespaceURI;
[code]

Section 3 of http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-names/ says:

The prefix xmlns is used only to declare namespace bindings and is by definition bound to the namespace name http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/.

Which implies that:

$xml->documentElement->getAttributeNS('http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/','xmlns') should work, but it doesn't.