xml-dev - SAX2: marrying SAX and DOM

[Ken MacLeod <ken@bitsko.slc.ut.us>]

The Perl SAX binding has used what I believe to be a very powerful
technique that I'd like to propose for SAX 2.0:

    Event handlers should be passed a DOM node instead of positional
    parameters.

The benefits to this technique are:

  * SAX parsers, event generators, and filters can more easily provide
    additional properties through the DOM nodes to handlers (if the
    underlying DOM implementation permits).

  * The DOM SAX event generators (a primary application of SAX) can
    pass the DOM nodes directly, instead of using the
    "http://xml.org/sax/properties/dom-node" feature.

  * A parser can [should?] maintain a partial DOM tree, at least
    parents, that would allow other XML functions to be used.  For
    example, using XPath to perform matching.

The primary drawback to this technique is the overhead of creating the
DOM nodes vs. just passing arguments.

A draft of the SAX 2.0 Beta binding for Perl that includes this
technique is available at:

  <http://bitsko.slc.ut.us/~ken/perl-xml/sax-2.0.html>

  -- Ken

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