SAX LexicalHandler::comment issue

[Rob Lugt <roblugt@elcel.com>]

Is there a good reason why the SAX LexicalHandler has a single comment()
method rather than the more traditional approach of using startComment(),
comment() and endComment()?

Comments can be arbitrarily large, and it seems to fly in the face of the
SAX streaming model to report a comment as a single event.  The implication
is that either the SAX Parser splits large comments on buffer boundaries and
reports each chunk to the application [undesirable as it changes the
structure of the document] or the SAX Parser will have to copy the comment
chunks to an (arbitrarily large) internal buffer until the entire comment is
read.

I have tried testing the SAX interface to xerces with a large comment and it
only called the comment() method once, suggesting that the comment was
buffered internally.  This is also the approach that we have adopted with
the SAX interface to our C++ XML Toolkit, but the underlying native
interface adopts the streaming approach

What are other peoples thoughts?  Is it worth proposing
startComment()/comment()/endComment() for SAX x.x?

Regards
~Rob

--
Rob Lugt
ElCel Technology
http://www.elcel.com/