xml-dev - Re: SAX Comments

[Rob Lugt <roblugt@elcel.com>]

At 21:55 on 4th December 2000, Robin Berjon wrote:
> I don't know which implementation you are referring to. Perl's SAX does
> comments, and I think it always has. Maybe others don't.
>

At the risk of this thread becoming "which SAX is real SAX?", I was
referring to the SAX 2.0 specification that can be found at David
Megginson's site: http://www.megginson.com/SAX/Java/javadoc/index.html

This is specifically a java binding of SAX 2.0, but I would expect other
"compliant" SAX 2.0 implementations to follow the same handler/callback
model and to support the same set of callbacks.  The perl/SAX implementation
is significantly different to this in that it has many additional callbacks
not present in the "official" specification.

Is the java binding considered to be the "official" specification?  Or is it
simply the one that is best documented?  Am I wrong to get too hung up about
SAX compliance?  I can see that for java developers strict compliance is a
way for multiple implementations to support a given interface, and therefore
enable plug-compatible parsers to be selected at runtime.  Microsoft's COM
interfaces can be used in a similar fashion.  But "standardized" bindings
for other languages (eg C++) do not exist - so it is impossible for non-java
implementations to claim true SAX 2.0 compliance.  Perhaps this is the
reason that perl/SAX evolved to be so different to the java binding?

Regards
Rob Lugt
ElCel Technology