Re: NSXML* classes

[Fred Kiefer]

On 22.02.2012 20:45, Gregory Casamento wrote:
> There are unit tests for the XPath code, but it's only one or two
> cases.   I need to build out the test cases to more thoroughly test
> the code.
>
> Anyone else who is interested should (if they would like) also put
> more cases in the make sure we have full coverage.

What I was looking for was a specific example that shows the need for 
the current retain count handling. We can only touch this, if we know 
about the problems we try to solve here. I don't like the current 
solution too much, as it wont work with GC or ARC, but wont touch it 
until we have enough test cases that show that an alternative solution 
is actually working.

While cleaning up the code I found a few issues that I would like to 
discuss here. One is the isEqual: method on NSXMLNode, the current 
implementation also checks the siblings of the node, which is obviously 
wrong and easy to solve (Just iterate over all children). But I would 
like to change the whole implementation here. Instead of going to the 
libxml2 structure for the test, I would like to implement it on the 
Objective-C level. The benefit would be that sub-nodes can easily 
override the check. Any opinion on that?

The next thing I found is that the whole namespace handling on 
NSXMLElement looks wrong. The structure element "ns" isn't present in 
xmlElement, we only have it in xmlNode. And even there it has a 
completely different meaning. Also I think that namespaces are a tree 
concept, not just a node or element one. You always should get the 
aggregated namespaces of all parent nodes.
Anybody out there, with a deeper understanding of this issue? Otherwise 
I just start to write test cases on Cocoa and try to reimplement that 
behaviour.