xml-dev - Re: Random XTech observations

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 01:07 PM 3/3/00 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>4. The DOM is everywhere, of course, but people seem to like
>   to gripe a lot about it, mainly about the memory usage -- to be
>   fair to the WG, that would be a problem with any tree-based API.
>   The irony is that everyone loves XSLT (see previous point), which
>   pretty-much requires a tree behind it, DOM or otherwise.
>
>5. People don't rag on SAX enough -- it has at least as many flaws as
>   the DOM, but it's protected by a kind of hacker cool (just as
>   presenters blame Windows when their slides don't work, but rarely do
>   the same with Linux).

I think Paul Prescod's EasySAX Python package represents a large change in
this discussion - there was both SAX and DOM bashing in his XTech
presentaiton but the end result was an approach that combines the two.  I
think EasySAX may be the start of something new, and it might well be worth
creating a Java-ized version of it.  (If only I had the time.)

It doesn't look like Paul's slides (or EasySAX) are up at his site yet, but
I wrote a brief XML.com article on it:
http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/02/xtech/relax.html

The same article covers RELAX, which I think may represent an important
turning point in the schema discussion.  It uses XML Schema datatypes, but
has its own vocabulary for structures - a much simpler one, though with
some features unavailable in XML Schemas.  Well worth a look.

There were some amazing presentations there.  Yes, there was some marketing
creeping in, but there was plenty of good food for thought as well.


Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com

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