xml-dev - Re: 1998-04-20 Pre-Release, with Road Map and Demos

[Peter Murray-Rust <peter@ursus.demon.co.uk>]

At 17:35 21/04/98 -0700, Don Park wrote:
>David,
>
>SAX, as it currently stands, does not return XML comments.  This is just
>fine for one way processing of XML documents.  However, I am having a
>problem with SAXDOM because of this seemingly irrelavant information loss.
>
>I will soon be adding DOM output classes to SAXDOM but documents edited with
>SAXDOM will lose all comments.  I think this is a significant weakness of
>SAX.

Don,
	I sympathise with anyone who worries about information loss, but it's
important to remember the roots and rationale of SAX. We pushed for SAX as
a *simple* tool to read the (mainly mandatory) output of XML parsers. We
were becoming overwhelmed with variants in the output interface.

	We had to draw the line somewhere and comments and CDATA were among those
below the cut. There is already a feeling that SAX is becoming too large.
I've held my peace on this because I was not familiar with the major recent
issues - exceptions and character handling and both of those have covered
important ground (both are generic problems with value elsewhere in the X*L
process).

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic
net connection
VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary
http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg

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