xml-dev - SAX questions

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Patrice Bonhomme writes:

 > 1/ For instance, the construction of the tree is supporting by the
 > parser (with some insertLast(...)).  Do i need to transfer the tree
 > construction within the "default XML handler" ?

SAX can work as an iterator over a tree, but it is suboptimal: a good
iterator would return each tree node.  For my MSXML SAX driver, I
explicitly disabled tree construction, since the greatest advantage of
an event-based (or streaming) API is the light resource usage.

 > 2/ What about CDATA sections, XML declaration, and validation
 > processus ?

CDATA sections and the XML declaration may both be included in a
level-two SAX, aimed at authoring tools, but they are not relevant for
the down-level processing tasks (such as formatting or database
import) which were SAX's initial target.

The user chooses validation or non-validation implicitly through the
selection of a SAX driver; SAX itself has no facility for turning
validation on or off, though it does allow an application to
distinguish validation errors from well-formedness errors (and to
ignore validation errors if desired).

 > 3/ If i understand the event-based philosophy, an XML parser do not
 > need to know something about DOM objects (no "new Element()", "new
 > Comment()" called within the code of the parser !) ?

The level-one SAX does not report comments.  If you are using
FREE-DOM, you can let FREE-DOM take care of node creation; if you are
building your own DOM using SAX, then you should create nodes inside
the handlers.

 > 4/ Is there a kind of "blue print" for developping an event-based
 > XML parser ?

Not specifically, but if you have access to a copy of DESIGN PATTERNS
(Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides) take a look at the Visitor
pattern on page 331.

More usefully, many of the existing XML parsers come with source code,
so dive in!


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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