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>I don't know. XML modellers faq:
>Q: Why are you putting stuff in attributes?
>A: I can't be arsed to code a buffer.
There is more to it than a buffer. Parsers can and do emit chunks of content
at boundaries that suit themselves. So
<foo>
Hello world
</foo>
is not guaranteed to produce 1 data event that can be slurped into a buffer in
one go. More generally, in the presence of mixed content there will definitely
be multiple chunks. So you end up with this pattern:
start_foo:
buffer = ""
inFoo = 1
end_foo:
print buffer
characters (chunk):
if inFoo:
buffer.append (chunk)
This rapidly gets out of hand.
Rightly, the need for this pattern drives the data-heads nuts. It would be
soo nice to
know that in the presence of data-oriented XML, the fundamental parser
layer would
emit complete PCDATA chunks.
Trouble is, there is no consensus on what data-oriented XML is and how
it could be flagged to a processor. Consequently, data-oriented APIs that
avoid that above unside-down and state-space-laden constructs
such as RAX (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/04/26/rax) cannot go
anywhere.
An XML Features Manifest would be one way to flag it
(http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/xml-dev-Dec-1999/0002.html)
but that never went anywhere either:-)
Oh well.
Sean
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