xml-dev - Enhancements to RAX / RSS angle

[Sean McGrath <sean@digitome.com>]

RAX (Record API for XML, http://www.digitome.com/rax.html) is
a drop dead simple API allowing "pull" processing of
record-oriented XML.

I have had some off-line discussions about RAX and
in particular, Eric Bohlman has some interesting
ideas for improving it which I post here with his
permission.

Given that Dave Winer has kickstarted a revisit
of RSS and given that RSS processing is
one of Eric's concerns below, the timing
of this discussion seems right.

Take it away Eric...

-------------------------
My first idea is a simple extension to RAX to allow multiple record
types.  It would require three changes:

1) RAX's SetRecord() method could take an array or list (depending on the
implementation language) of element names as well as a single element
name.  All named elements would be recognized as record delimiters.

2) Record would have a new method, GetType(), which would return the name
of the record's delimiting element.

3) Record's constructor would take an optional parameter specifying the
record type.  If the parameter were omitted, the type would be set to the
first name supplied to SetRecord() (to avoid breaking existing code that
directly call's Record's constructor to create records for output; the RAX
object would obviously supply the correct type when constructing a record
to return from ReadRecord).

Thus if you were reading a typical RSS file, you'd call SetRecord with
arguments "image" "item" and "textinput".  The first call would return a
record whose type, according to GetType(), was "image."  The next several
calls would return records of type "item" and the last call would possibly
return a "textinput" record.

-----------------------

http://www.pyxie.org - an Open Source XML Processing library for Python


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