Minor Description
OMElement#declareNamespace(String, String) auto-generates a prefix if the prefix is either null or the empty string. There are several issues with this:
1. It is inconsistent with other APIs (in particular OMElement#declareNamespace(OMNamespace) which make a distinction between null (indicating that a prefix should be generated) and the empty string (meaning the default namespace).
2. It is not possible to use OMElement#declareNamespace(String, String) to declare a default namespace. This is especially annoying when the prefix is provided as a variable, in which case one has to write something like this:
if (prefix.length() == 0)
{ nextElem.declareDefaultNamespace(uri); }else
{ nextElem.declareNamespace(uri, prefix); }3. It is obviously not necessary to support two different ways to indicate that a prefix should be generated. One (prefix == null) should be enough.
This should be changed in the next major release (1.3). To make the transition easier, the Javadoc in 1.2.x should be updated to indicate that using an empty string is deprecated and the code should generate a warning if the method is invoked in this way.