xml-dev - SAX2: Querying the client

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Box, Don writes:

 > 1) The feature mechanism is busted wrt the two namespace-related
 > features.  It assumes that the ContentHandler interface will only
 > be called by an XMLReader implementation. This makes it tough for
 > folks who want to use ContentHandler (and friends) as a generic
 > interface for modeling the Infoset as a stream of method
 > invocations (see David Brownell's stuff for an example of one such
 > architecture), since one doesn't know generically whether or not to
 > deliver namespace declarations as attributes or not. In general,
 > the "consumer" of ContentHandler should be able to interrogate the
 > namespace management policy of the receiver of the SAX events.

In general, I've tried to keep the information flow in SAX one-way,
though we violated that with EntityResolver.  

If we were to make such a change, we would have to allow other sorts
of queries as well, so a more general client-side
get/setFeature/Property would make the most sense -- why make
Namespace processing a special case?

That said, I'm not comfortable making such a major structural change
this late; I think that it is more suitable for an architectural layer 
built higher up (where, maybe, the ContentHandler can register itself
somehow).


All the best,


David

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

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