xml-dev - Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: Proposed SAX Revisions

[James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>]

David Megginson wrote:

> 2) there is no way to obtain contextual information (system id, line
>    number, etc.) for reporting application errors;

I have mixed feelings about this.  I think this is useful information
for some applications.  On other hand, I don't think XML parsers are
under any obligation to provide this information; it has a cost in terms
of performance and complexity and parser writers may decide that, for
their target market, it's not worth this cost.  I don't think SAX should
be impossible to implement on top of such parsers.  Also SAX is supposed
to be simple.  Adding a Location argument to every single callback is a
very significant increase in complexity.  Moreover it complicates the
use of SAX for all applications, even those (I guess the majority) that
are aren't interested in this location information. Unless a better way
can be found to do this, I don't think this functionality should be
added.

James



xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)