xml-dev - Re: (more) extensible SAX

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Daniel Barclay writes:

 > I think one of the Apache XML mailing lists is having a discussion about
 > how to give a SAX event generator information about which events or
 > elements are of interest, so it can more quickly skip over unneeded
 > information.

Sure, but as it stands now, you can just ignore what you don't need
(that's the default if you extend
org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler).  The parser has to read the stuff
anyway to maintain its state, so the overhead should be close to zero.

It's also worth noting that in almost any XML document that's not
trivially small, 99.9% of the callbacks will be start/end element,
characters, and possibly ignorable whitespace.  Processing
instructions, notation declarations, etc., are so rare relatively that
even if there were some overhead to reporting those events, you
wouldn't gain anything from cutting them out.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/