Re: lxml - addition of argument to control namespace declaration serializtion

Hi,

these things are best discussed on the list.

Grimes, David wrote:
> In 1.3.5-1.3.6 timeframe, there was a patch introduced to
> _writeNodeToBuffer() from serialization.pxi which forced namespace
> declarations from parent nodes to be serialized onto the sub-tree root
> node.  In general, and with respect to XML standards, this make a great
> deal of sense (so you don't have prefixed elements/attributes without the
> corresponding namespace declaration).
>
> But, the application I've been building essentially takes an XML document
> and makes template-string blocks of text out of various sub-trees, to be
> later combined back into a full document using __getitem__ substitution in
> the form of "%(token)s" string formatting.
>
> The nsdecl patch of 1.3.5/6 causes interesting behaviour when the sub-tree
> being rendered is done in, for example, a loop - one "formatting
> operation" per iteration.  Also interesting is when many such sub-trees
> are combined to form a document which (in my case) we know will have the
> declarations on the ultimate root node.

What you mean is that we actually make a copy of a non-root node and then
copy over the namespace declarations of the ancestors. You say
"interesting behaviour". Does that refer to the performance overhead or is
there a 'real' problem you see?

Looking at the code now, I see some potential optimisations, so if it's
just the performance, here's a (trunk) patch that should give a bit of