[JDEV] Namespaces vs. Attributes

[David Waite]

Ari Johnson wrote:

>Looking at the jabberd code, it does indeed treat these as xmlns and
>xmlns:stream attributes on the element.  Can anyone explain the reasoning
>behind this method, or if a fix might be possible without severely
>injuring the Jabber server itself?  I really don't want to have to
>redesign my project around an incorrect subset of the XML standard if I
>can avoid it.  Thanks.
>
This (together with the 'jabber:server' / 'jabber:component:accept' 
namespace usage) would be rather difficult to fix at this point without 
breaking interoperability with nearly every client, server, and server 
component - many of these use custom parsers which do not have any 
support for namespaces, and rely on a particular prefix just like the 
open-source server.

Another problem is the way data gets multiplexed and demuxed throughout 
the server.  A single inter-server connection will represent a subset of 
users, and this requires the appropriate portions of those 'user' 
documents to be represented in the 'inter-server' document.

Currently, first-level elements are treated as independant sub-documents 
when being routed, because namespaces are ignored - namespaces are the 
only construct which really requires this subset to be dependant on its 
ancestors. The sub-documents ("XML chunks") are simply assumed to have a 
set of namespaces required by the base document - any other declared 
namespaces are not added to the opposite document for correctness. For 
proper namespace support, all first-level elements would need to be 
reprocessed at some level to make them suitable for importing into a new 
document.

In short, I don't think it is really anything that can be cleverly 
hacked in. Either a lot of things will break, or a lot of logic will 
need to be added for supporting legacy clients/servers. It has been off 
and on the roadmap for the open-source server, but I don't believe it 
will ever be changed/fixed until someone who actually cares decides to 
change/fix it.

-David Waite