[jdom-interest] parentless DOM nodes created by DOMOutputter

Jason Hunter jhunter at servlets.com
Fri Apr 12 13:24:38 PDT 2002


Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> 
> The DOMOutputter class contains these two methods:
> 
> public org.w3c.dom.Element *output*(Element
> <http://www.jdom.org/docs/apidocs/org/jdom/Element.html>  element)
> throws JDOMException
> <http://www.jdom.org/docs/apidocs/org/jdom/JDOMException.html>
> public org.w3c.dom.Attr *output*(Attribute
> <http://www.jdom.org/docs/apidocs/org/jdom/Attribute.html>  attribute)
> throws JDOMException
> <http://www.jdom.org/docs/apidocs/org/jdom/JDOMException.html>
> 
> The DOM contract is that every Attr and Element (and every other Node
> too) always belongs to exactly one Documnt or DocumentFragment object.
> What document would the return values of these methods be placed in? Or
> are we violating the DOM contract somehow with these two methods? Even
> if we manage to create orphan nodes, since the ownerDocument attribute
> in Node is read-only, these nodes we create cannot be adopted into a
> different DOM document. I suggest we remove these methods, possibly
> after deprecating them for a release cycle, though I doubt very much
> anyone is using them.

Yes, it'd be good to hear who if anyone is using them, and how.

What about returning a DocumentFragment?

-jh-



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