xml-dev - Re: anti-goals

[David Megginson <ak117@freenet.carleton.ca>]

Matthew Gertner writes:

 > My point should have been that it will be easier to nip ongoing
 > discussions about supported features in the bud if there is an
 > "officially" stated intention to provide an advanced interface as
 > well. I would like to sit down and write down some of our
 > requirements for a "repository loader" interface (no doubt very
 > similar to a DOM builder), but I see the danger of losing focus at
 > this point. I remember the date January 12th floating around as the
 > deadline for some concrete SAX implementations. Would this be an
 > appropriate time to make some more detailed comments about an
 > extended interface?

The new architecture that I proposed yesterday would make this very
simple.  I proposed that we have three different Java interfaces for
call-backs (I can now supply package names as well):

 org.xml.sax.EntityHandler
 org.xml.sax.DocumentHandler
 org.xml.sax.ErrorHandler

There are setters for all of these in the parser interface,
org.xml.sax.Parser:

 package org.xml.sax;

 public interface Parser {
  public void setEntityHandler (EntityHandler handler);
  public void setDocumentHandler (DocumentHandler handler);
  public void setErrorHandler (ErrorHandler handler);

  public void parse (String publicID, String systemID) throws Exception;
 }

To create an interface that delivers more information, we could simply
define a new interface, say, org.xml.FancyHandler, and then extend
the Parser interface:

  package org.xml.sax;

  public interface FancyParser extends Parser {
    public void setFancyHandler (FancyHandler handler);
  }

I see no reason that we cannot turn our attention to this issue once
the current SAX is implemented and relatively stable -- at least, we
have not shut the door to future enhancement.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 ak117@freenet.carleton.ca
Microstar Software Ltd.         dmeggins@microstar.com
      http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

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