xml-dev - Re: SAX2: relative ordering of startDocument() & startDTD() events?

[David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>]

Ken MacLeod wrote:
> 
> David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net> writes:
> 
> > Ken MacLeod wrote:
> > >
> > > In several cases I would prefer internalEntityReference() and
> > > externalEntityReference() event handlers that simply report the
> > > reference but do not resolve the reference, or that call back the
> > > parser to further resolve them.
> >
> > Using a single unSkippedEntity (String name) call, you tell them apart
> > if you track their entity declarations (with a DeclHandler).  Is that
> > level of work OK for you?
> 
> Do you mean skippedEntity()?

No, I was actually trying for parallel construction for the two
kinds of entity calls.  There's skippedEntity(String) in the
ContentHandler interface, so ... "unSkippedEntity(String)" for
the cases where "skippedEntity() wasn't called, and you weren't
inside of some markup construct.


> Yes, I'm OK with using entity declarations (DeclHandler) to
> distinguish internal and external entities.
> 
> What I mean is that I'd rather have an entityReference() handler than
> {start, end}Entity() handlers.

That was my question:  so yes, it's OK.


> There's some issues with the processing model though.  There would
> probably need to be a mode feature where either entityReference() is
> called or entities are resolved.  More difficult, if a handler wanted
> to know _both_ the entity reference and the resolved content (which is
> probably where {start, end}Entity() is proposed).

Yes, I was thinking that one could go that route.  Basically you'd
get to control on an entity-by-entity basis whether to expand any
given entity ref ... which conflicts a bit with the simple true/false
model of "handles external {parameter,general} entities" flag.

Having stared at entities too long, I mostly don't want them to get
more broken.  (Is there any more of a structure to PE processing
than a set of special cases?)  I like the simplicity of saying yes/no
to the external entity categories -- means there are only five kinds
of parses and hence error states to really worry about, versus being
combinatoric in the number of entities that can be included/not.

So while I could see how to make that approach work (callback is a
predicate saying include/exclude the specified entity), I'm not sure
it's a good idea to even start walking in that direction, without
some compelling reason to do so.

Seemed like you might have some particular use cases to motivate
such a thing though.

- Dave

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