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Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2006 09:29:05 -0500
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Subject: new simplexml functionality
From: rrichards@ctindustries.net (Rob Richards)

I would like to propose adding addChild and addAtribute methods to 
simplexml. I know these have been shot down in the past, but with 
Marcus' recent changes to simplexml, they now make sense imo.

SimpleXMLElement::addChild(string qName, string value [,string ns])
SimpleXMLElement::addAttribute(string qName, string value [,string ns])

http://www.ctindustries.net/patches/sxe.diff.txt

Rational:
It is not possible to add elements to a tree, but new namespaced 
elements/attributes cannot (although existing ones can be modified).
With these methods, new attributes and elements can be added that will 
also create namespaces with prefixes in the event the do not exist in 
the document.
This would pretty much eliminate the need to use DOM in most cases for 
those who dont want it or have it and make behavior more consistent. It 
doesn't seem right that some things can be added and other things can't.

The method names I used are abritrary so I would not be against changing 
them.
Same goes The behavior of addAtribute. Right now it allows an attribute 
to be added to an attribute list as long as it does not exist and 
respects the namespacing passed in as parameters rather than the 
namespace scope of the attribute list. For now I left it loose, but am 
not against only allowing attributes to be added to elements.

To the argument that DOM could just be used to provide the 
functionality, the same cause could be made for the getName, 
getNamespaces and  getDocNamespaces methods as well and these new 
functions are much more useful imo.

Rob