Why are parameters to startElement() empty in SAX handler?

Question

I extended the SAX DefaultHandler in the standard JAXP download. The startElement() method has 4 parameters, but only the third one gets any values. Even with the tag shown below, the URI parameter is always blank as is the local name parameter. The qualifed name parameter gives either the local name or a namespace:local name as its value. Why don't the 1st two parameters have the URI and local name?
<MyNS:WakeUP xmlns:MyNS="http://www.mywebsite.com/"> no doze </MyNS:WakeUP>
Art Salwin
[email protected]

Answer 1

The reason for the behaviour you described might
be that namespace handling is disabled by default.
Set it explicitely like this:
javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory spf =
            javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
// JAXP 1.0 first defined the default value to be false,
// then SAX 2.0 came along and defined a "namespaces" feature
// with a default of true, finally JAXP 1.1 came along
// and had to maintain backward compatibility with JAXP 1.0, yet support SAX 2.0.
spf.setNamespaceAware(true); Kullervo