xml-dev - Re: SAX: Character Stream vs. Byte Stream proposal...

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

Tyler Baker writes:

 > Typically, low-level stuff such as this I feel should be
 > implemented once and then reused over and over again.  There are
 > only so many ways to write character encoders / decoders and I
 > would wager that most parsers out there pretty much have very
 > similiar implementations for reading from byte streams.  XML's
 > beauty is not in the fact the spec defines support for about 6 or
 > so different character encoding formats, it is in everything else.
 > If another character encoding format comes out, then every SAX
 > parser will have to possibly do a rewrite.  If people could agree
 > upon one good efficient dependable implementation, then no one
 > (other than the people doing the 600 or so lines of character
 > encoding implementation code) will have to do a thing.  Of course,
 > people could plug in their own character encoder / decoder
 > implementations if they so choose, but at least they would have the
 > choice.

The nice thing here is that all of this can be built on top of SAX
instead of inside it.  Some implementors are already complaining --
quite understandably -- that SAX has grown far too large.  However,
there is a great opportunity here for someone (or a group of people)
to write a separate SAX toolkit that includes what you suggest and
much more (such as classes implementing AttributeList and Locator,
with copy constructors).


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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