xml-dev - Re: SAX: Parser Interface -- Summary of Change Requests

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

Michael Kay writes:

 > I don't know the Java technicalities, but surely what we mean by a stream
 > here is something that supplies a sequence of Unicode characters. (Surely
 > it's
 > not the parser's job to turn bytes into characters?)

That depends on the type of stream.  I would not want to force the
client to do encoding conversion for a stream that happened to be open
to a local file or an HTTP connection.

 > We should also ensure that the design makes certain special cases easy for
 > the application writer, e.g.:
 > 
 > a) the primary input source is a file in filestore. (Translating the
 > filename to a URL is error-prone and it would be better for the parser to do
 > it)
 > 
 > b) there is only one input source (e.g. a record containing XML read from a
 > database, with no DTD or other external entities), probably available
 > already in the application as the contents of a String.

It should be possible to read from a string, but it would not be safe
to assume that the string contains no DTD or external entities -- it
would always be necessary to supply a base URI as well.


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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