annoying DOM limitation

I had just posted a comment on your blog about this.

$root->setAttributeNS('http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/',
'xmlns:xsd','http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema');
should do exactly what you want.

Rob

George Schlossnagle wrote:

While hacking on a PHPDoc -> WSDL generator, I ran into an annoying
limitation in the dom extension: you can't add a namespace to a dom
document unless you have an element in that namespace. Why might you
want to do this? Well, a common thing is to have your xml-schema
types to be specified as attribute values, i.e.

<element name="foo" type="xsd:string"/>

for this to work I need xsd to be an alias for http://www.w3.org/2001/
XMLSchema.

To work around this, I added a DomElement::addNS($uri, $alias) method
to Dom. Adding the namespace 'manually' as an attribute on an
element does not work.

I know this isn't part of the Dom spec, but it's incredibly useful.
Does anyone (Rob, Chegru) mind me adding it to HEAD?

While hacking on a PHPDoc -> WSDL generator, I ran into an
annoying limitation in the dom extension: you can't add a
namespace to a dom document unless you have an element in
that namespace. Why might you want to do this? Well, a
common thing is to have your xml-schema types to be specified
as attribute values, i.e.

<element name="foo" type="xsd:string"/>

for this to work I need xsd to be an alias for
http://www.w3.org/2001/ XMLSchema.

To work around this, I added a DomElement::addNS($uri,
$alias) method to Dom. Adding the namespace 'manually' as an
attribute on an element does not work.

I know this isn't part of the Dom spec, but it's incredibly useful.
Does anyone (Rob, Chegru) mind me adding it to HEAD?

Hmm, I have been doing this via setAttributeNS(), with the XML namespace namepace

define('NS_NS', 'http://www.w3.org/2000/xmlns/');
define('NS_XLINK', 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink');

$document = new DOMDocument();
$root = $document->createElement('root');
$document->appendChild($root);
$root->setAttributeNS(NS_NS, 'xmlns:xlink', NS_XLINK);
echo $document->saveXML();

Haven't encountered any problems with this method, seems to produce XML (SVG in this case) fine.

Jared