• To: XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Parser structure (historical background question)
• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 23:25:59 -0500
• In-reply-to: <3BFC07E2.7060401@s...>
• Organization: Red Bridge Interactive, Inc.
• References: <3BFC07E2.7060401@s...>

On Wednesday 21 November 2001 03:00 pm, Dennis Sosnoski wrote:
> I'm curious how it came about that (at least for SAX) validation was
> incorporated into the parser. It'd seem to make a lot more sense to have
> it as a separate layer that works off a parse event stream. This type of
> approach would vastly increase the flexibility (allowing validation to
> be just another pipeline step) without substantially adding to the
> costs, as far as I can see.
>
> Any comments?

Historically, SGML *required* validation of the parser, so many of the early 
discussions around validation assumed this. I forget who first noted that 
validation is orthoganal to parsing, but I know I was an early proponent
of "lazy validation". Tim Bray's Lark/Larva good example of a pipeline 
approach to this.

I have no idea why later parsers added early validation. It still seems like
a bad idea to me...

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