xml-dev - SAX2 and Symmetrical Treatment of Data

[Alex Milowski <alex@milowski.com>]

In the ContentHandler interface, there is a method called character()
which allows the processor to pass the character data that is a child
of an element to a processing application.  If you introduce XML Schemas,
this allows one to create a streaming type factory to construct the
actual type instance without having to first instantiate a Java
string--which is very good from an optimization standpoint.

Unfortunately, the same concept does not exist for attributes.  An
attribute's value is already been constructed into a Java string before
the application can receive the lexical representation.  This seems rather
unforunate for XML Schemas and optimization since the typing of "leaf
nodes" within an XML document is uniform for attributes and element child
content.

Is it too late to fix this?  This would seriously help in building
optimized XML Schema aware processors.


R. Alexander Milowski           FAX: (707) 598-7649           alex@milowski.com

"The excellence of grammar as a guide is proportional to the paucity of the
 inflexions, i.e. to the degree of analysis effected by the language
 considered." 

 Bertrand Russell in a footnote of Principles of Mathematics