Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
David Megginson [david@m...] wrote: ... Personally, I think that the XML community would be better served if purely lexical items like Namespace prefixes, the DOCTYPE declaration, comments, element type declarations, entity boundaries, etc. were simply inaccessible through any standard API -- that way, the APIs would be easier to learn and the obfuscators of the world would be less likely to abuse them. I hope you are not talking about people who use the APIs. If the people who have to use APIs did not have to look at these things, they would not want them in any APIs. Personally, I do not believe people who write specifications will look at XML APIs to limit their imagination. They will look at what is in an XML document. And API writers will then have to make sure their APIs can do everything under the Sun. Or the people who have to implement the specifications will just do it themselves or not implement the specifications at all. If SAX2 had not given me the comment nodes in XML documents, I would not have switched to SAX. I would have stayed in DOM for my little implementation of XPath. Or, more likely, I would have started implementing my own XML parser. I did not specify XPath. As an implementor, I will choose the tool that allows me to do my work. And in general, it is not a problem we can avoid. How many people need to get the comments of a Java program in source form? I can think of a few: people who have to implement something like JavaDoc. The ordinary Joe would not think of implementing JavaDoc because not that many people can handle it. I see it as a strength rather than a weakness for everybody in XML to be able to access anything in an XML document. And SAX is doing a wonderful job. And I thank you very much for that. I am tired, however, from all the e-mails from DOM implementors who want comments (for example) in SAX so that they can bloat their DOM trees with them. They're wrong, of course, but I'm too tired to fight any more. And if both DOM and SAX had not provided access to comment nodes and specifications like XSLT and XPath allow manipulation of these nodes, we would have seen XML parsers left and right that did not support any standard APIs. I consider that a worse scenario than the current situation. The issue about why some features got into various W3C specifications is too big for me to know. :-) Regards, Khun Yee Fung 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...)
|
