xml-dev - RE: Who will maintain SAX?

[Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@Allegis.com>]

> From: David Megginson [mailto:david@megginson.com]
> [...]
> Since SAX is through its initial rapid-development stage, I'm inclined
> to hand it over to an institution rather than to an individual.  I've
> considered the W3C and OASIS, but since SAX is really a developers'
> project rather than a standards-writers' project, I wondered if the
> Apache Project might not make the best home -- they're well set up to
> deal with this sort of thing, and have demonstrated a high degree of
> technical competence.

Although you say that SAX is a "developers' project rather than a
standard-writers' project", SAX has had a huge impact and become a de facto
standard for parsing XML. I think there is great value in that, and it would
be great to see that further leveraged rather than lost. Microsoft, for
instance, supports SAX2 in there MSXML3 parser. I don't know that they'd be
inclined to follow further developments on SAX if Apache took ownership of
it.

It's worthwhile, here, to make a distinction between the APIs and the
implementation. I wouldn't see anything wrong with Apache taking ownership
of an implementation. But it sure would be nice to see the W3C adopt the SAX
APIs as a standard interface for parsing. It would be a nice complement to
the DOM. Any further development on the APIs by the W3C would undoubtedly
continue to receive broad vendor support. I don't know that the same could
be said for further development on it by Apache. Some vendors love Apache;
some vendors hate it.

Of course, the W3C has its hands full, so this probably isn't viable. But
some sort of vendor-neutral organization would be better than, I think,
Apache.