Problem with SAX2 Serialization and namespaces in Xerces 1.1.3

[Mikael St�ldal <d9...@d.kth.se>]

The following sample program:

import java.io.*;

import org.apache.xml.serialize.*;
import org.xml.sax.*;
import org.xml.sax.helpers.AttributesImpl;
 
public class Serialize
{
	public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
	{
		if (args.length < 1)
		{
			System.out.println("Syntax: Serialize <filename>");
			return;
		}

        OutputFormat of = new OutputFormat();
        of.setEncoding("iso-8859-1");
        of.setDoctype(null,null);
        XMLSerializer serial =
            new XMLSerializer(new FileOutputStream(args[0]), of);

		ContentHandler ch = serial.asContentHandler();

        ch.startDocument();

		AttributesImpl atts = new AttributesImpl();
		atts.addAttribute("http://www.foo.com/attrNs", "fruit", "", 
						  "CDATA", "banana");
        ch.startElement("http://www.foo.com/ns", "foo", "", atts);
        ch.characters("foo bar".toCharArray(),0,7);
        ch.endElement("http://www.foo.com/ns", "foo", "");

        ch.endDocument();
	}
}

Generates the following ill-formed output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
< ="banana">foo bar</>

Perhaps the Xerces serialization module assume that the qname argument
to ContentHandler.startElement/endElement and
AttributesImpl.addAttrbute should be null when not present? But
according to the SAX2 documentation, it should be the empty string.

If I change the qname argument to null in the attribute, I'll get this
result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
< fruit="banana">foo bar</>

If I change the qname argument to null in the element, I'll get:

java.lang.NullPointerException
at
org.apache.xml.serialize.XMLSerializer.startElement(XMLSerializer.java:224)

If I use ContentHandler.startPrefixDeclaration for both namespace URIs
and use null as qname argument for both element and attribute, then I
finally get the expected result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<ns:foo ans:fruit="banana" xmlns:ns="http://www.foo.com/ns" xmlns:ans="http://www.foo.com/attrNs">foo bar</ns:foo>

However, should it really be nessesary to use startPrefixDeclaration?
Isn't the serializer supposed to make up prefixes as needed? It should
of course use any startPrefixDeclaration bindings.

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