xml-dev - Re: Who will maintain SAX?

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 04:55 PM 10/2/00 +0200, Michael Champion wrote:
>Is the objective of a single, platform neutral and vendor neutral XML API
>suite unrealistic? Or is there some way that the choice of a SAX maintainer
>can move us toward that objective?

Boy, that's a nice question.  I'd like to think that there's some answer to
that which provides enough diversity for ideas to flow but also enough
conformity for IT shops to take XML seriously.

>This suggests to me that the diversity that has served us well to foster
>innovation in the
>area of XML APIs -- SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, Trax, etc. -- works against
>getting XML taken seriously in the IT shops of the world.  I think we've
>learned enough to collectively build a common, consistent XML API suite for
>parsing, tree manipulation, searching, transformation, serialization,
>storage, etc. SAX is only one part of this picture, but I fear that keeping
>it as a "ding in sich" (thing in itself?) will be seen as part of the
>"nonsense" that the business community won't tolerate any more.

I'm afraid this diversity is causing problems.  I've only taken the first
three specs you note - SAX, DOM, and JDOM - seriously, and that's already
provided me with too many choices at times.  I've had a bias against JAXP
because of the not-really-vendor-neutral-and-expensive process behind it,
but the overall motivation seems reasonable, as does Trax.

>SOME credible standards organization ought to try to pull all this together.
>Ideally (IMHO) it would be the W3C -- for all its faults, it has a
>reasonable combination of competence, credibility, openness, and
>flexibility. On the other hand, the other DOM people (I'm one of them)
>haven't seen the integration of SAX, XPath, XSLT, etc. into the DOM API as a
>priority, and the SAX people have not asked, so perhaps there's not much
>point in pursuing that option. Still, I can't think of a better one... The
>Open Group, the Open Applications Group, etc. all are possibilities, but
>have steep membership fees too.

Is integration ever a priority?  I keep dreaming of this modular world
where it's not so difficult to combine XPointer and the DOM or even
XPointer and SAX, but it just doesn't seem to happen that way in the real
world.

Maybe it's just that I'm a mere integrator, not truly a 'developer', but I
do keep hoping.

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