xml-dev - Re: Parser compliance

[Walter Underwood <wunder@infoseek.com>]

At 10:07 PM 11/18/99 -0600, Steven R. Newcomb wrote:
>
>In my own mind, the purpose of XML, as a tool, is to get information (not
>just data) from A to B.  I think of information as having two forms:
>
>(1) ready-to-run objects in memory, e.g. ready-to-roll DOM
>
>(2) interchangeable (but otherwise useless) serialized-into-characters
>    XML

This doesn't begin to cover a lot of what XML is used for. It does
cover document-like uses, but not the data-serialization uses.
In the latter, folks want their application objects, not objects
that accurately reflect the source document. They need something
more like marshalling/unmarshalling code, going straight to the
app-meaningful objects.

Even for some documentation-like uses, a DOM is the wrong answer.
Our search engine needs to extract text and store it in the indexes.
Analyzing the documents in a stream (SAX) means handling bigger
documents, using less memory, et cetera.

wunder
--
Walter R. Underwood
wunder@infoseek.com
wunder@best.com (home)
http://software.infoseek.com/
http://www.best.com/~wunder/
1-408-543-6946

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