xml-dev - RE: Who will maintain SAX?

[Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@Allegis.com>]

> From: Seairth Jacobs [mailto:seairth@bbglobex.com]
> [...]
> He's not saying that it should be taken on by W3C to be 
> beefed up to be like
> DOM.  He's saying that it would be nice for there to be a W3C 
> standard like
> SAX to compliment the features of DOM.  After all, SAX is an 
> ideal choice
> for building the DOM.  SAX should be left as it is, and I 
> think that most
> people (the W3C especially) understand that.

Exactly. Those were the sentiments I was trying to express. In Apache's
hands, it is likely to be beefed up quite a bit, as well. And Apache is
quite explicitly not in the standards business. Right now, when a vendor or
developer says their products supports "SAX" or "SAX2", everyone knows what
that means. Whoever picks up maintenance of SAX, I'd hate to see that get
lost, or for SAX to become bloated as the maintainer beefs it up without
differentiating between an enhanced implementation and a reference set of
APIs.
 
> Now, the only down side I see to the W3C is the development 
> cycle time.  SAX
> has gone through two versions in the same amount of time that 
> some of the
> W3C projects have gone from draft to recommendation.  
> Technology is moving
> much faster than the W3C can manage to keep up with.

Quite true, and that's a good argument for NOT turning over to the W3C.
However, I think some other organization that is equivalently vendor neutral
would be a good choice (and I'm not sure, offhand, who could fit the bill,
here). I'm not so sure that Apache would be such a good choice. I don't know
that that would sit well with all of the vendors who are currently
supporting SAX.

> From: Bill dehOra [mailto:wdehora@cromwellmedia.co.uk]
> [...]
> SAX sounds like it belongs on something like sourceforge or 
> just kept on xml-dev as a ding in sich. 

That may be the best choice.