Re: We need an XPath API

[Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@earthlink.net>]

3/5/01 12:37:11 PM, Christian Nentwich <c.nentwich@cs.ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

>> > 5) Work on DOM trees as well as with a SAX parser (DOM tree query support 
is
>> > essential in my opinion.. SAX alone is no good. What if your dom tree 
comes
>> > out of a database?)
>> requires a well-formedness parse as the first step in processing at each 
layer,
>> and a stream of SAX events is the simplest, lightest, and most neutral
>> expression of that parse. In fact, as a matter of local process 
optimization
>> those SAX events themselves may be routed through layered filters without 
much
>
>To be honest, I'm a bit confused. Could you elaborate how this would
>help anyone who doesn't actually have the DOM tree represented as an XML
>file but gets it out of some data source ? I haven't been following the
>abstraction debate that much..

It's always possible to traverse a DOM and generate SAX events from it (though 
it may not be possible to generate the sort of events a LexicalHandler is 
expecting).