xml-dev - RE: UNIX pipes, XML processing

[Sasha Nakhimovsky <sasha@mail.colgate.edu>]

Come to think of it, XSLT stylesheets can also work as filters.  Xalan can
take a stream of SAX events on input and send another one to output
(apologies for my ignorance about Saxon and others).  One can hope that
stylesheets compiled by Sun's xsltc will have that functionality also.  It
should be possible to mix and match stylesheets and SAX filters in the same
pipe.

Sasha

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon St.Laurent [mailto:simonstl@simonstl.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 25, 2000 5:15 PM
To: XML-Dev Mailing list
Subject: RE: UNIX pipes, XML processing


At 05:03 PM 7/25/00 -0400, Sasha Nakhimovsky wrote:
>The idea of SAX filters ( http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/ , incorporated
>into SAX2) clearly belongs here.  The computational model [of SAX filters]
>is the same as in Unix pipes, except Unix filters work on a linear sequence
>of lines in a text file, while SAX filters work on tree-structured data.

I like that very much!

You can use SAX filters when passing processing around inside one system,
and re-serialization and parsing when you need to cross system barriers.
In either case, you get to enjoy the benefits of labeled structures.

It doesn't solve every problem in programming, but it's a nice model for
many kinds of flow.

Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
http://www.simonstl.com - XML essays and books