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On Fri, Dec 03, 1999 at 01:21:38PM -0500, David Megginson wrote: [Re: whether to work on SAX2 or on SAX/C++] > I can think of a few reasons that the world might desperately be > waiting for SAX2: > > 1. To get some kind of standard Namespace support (or at least a way > to tell whether a parser has Namespace support built in). > > 2. To query parser features in general. > > 3. To get at the stuff that SAX 1.0 doesn't report, like comments, > CDATA boundaries, and DTD declarations. > > I'm very interested in hearing other opinions. Having a standard > streaming interface stimulated a lot of development of reusable Java > XML processing components, and I'd like to see the same thing happen > in C++, but I need to hear what other people think the priorities > should be. #1 clearly is important; if only to ensure that SAX remains a desirable and viable interface. If application developers or parser writers are start to walk away from SAX due to a lack of namespace support, then SAX will rapidly die. #3 is vital for many XML *processing* applications. If you want to provide a SAX interface to an XML database server that must be able to round-trip documents, SAX 1.0 isn't enough. If you're writing an editor, or an XSLT engine, or a compound document manager, or a transport protocol like WBXML, you want or need to know about things that are in the SAX2 LexicalHandler (e.g. CDATA sections, comments), NamespaceHandler, and DeclHandler. For other applications, #3 isn't relevant. But that's the value of #2: parser writers can implement the features and support the properties they wish to, and application writers can selectively invoke that functionality. As it happens, I'm in the process of implementing a SAX interface for a couple of SIM-related projects. We need, I think, the functionality that SAX2 provides. Given that our code base is in C++, I guess my vote is for both: a stable SAX2 and a standard C++ definition. But having taken a look at SAX2, not much seems to be wrong with it. Whereas there's already close to a dozen SAX/C++ variants, and climbing. *That* trend needs to be stepped on, and quickly, before it gets out of hand. Michael ____________________________________________ http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au/~msf/ Multimedia Databases Group, RMIT, Australia. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; unsubscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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