Unfortunately, TrAX (and the other new parts of JAXP) is vastly
underspecified. There is no definitive answer to your questions.
Different implementations can and do behave differently. A careful
reading of the spec leads to many unanswerable questions. This is
just one of them. At various times I have submitted some of these
questions to Sun as bugs, so far without response ,or acknowledgement
of any kind. It seems no one at Sun is paying attention to JAXP these
days.
Overall, JAXP is much like the rest of Java, especially in its early
days: a partial description intended to assist developers in using a
single implementation. Aside from the parts adopted from other, more
careful specs (SAXX and DOM) the JAXP spec is not adequate
specification for independent implementers.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo(_at_)metalab(_dot_)unc(_dot_)edu |
Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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