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Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> At 7:21 PM -0800 1/21/04, Tim Bray wrote:
>
>> 1. Any output encoding other than UTF-8
>> 2. Optional escaping of illegal characters
>> 3. Prettyprinting support
>> 4. Various kinds of error workarounds, and turning errorchecking off
>> 5. Writing CDATA sections
>> 6. Writing XML declaration (good idea, but I want the output to be
>> Canonical XML)
>
>
> I think you're at best at 50% with these goals, maybe less. This is
> certainly not at 80%.
>
> My experience with JDOM, XOM, and other APIs for doing operations like
> XInclude that ultimately reslt in a serialized XML document is that
> users really, really want pretty-printing a lot of the time. If the
> API wont do that, they will ignore it. I wouldn't pretty print by
> default, but I would definitely include options for setting the
> maximum line length and indent string.
hi,
i think that using something similiar to SAX setFeature/Property could
work pretty well to set optional properties such as indenting. for example:
private final static String INDENT_PROP
=
"http://xmlpull.org/v1/doc/properties.html#serializer-indentation";;
try {
serializer.setProperty(INDENT_PROP, " ");
} catch (IllegalArgumentException e) {} catch
(IllegalStateException e) {}
i also like idea of self-describing property URI so you can open it in
browser and see description of the property.
http://xmlpull.org/v1/doc/properties.html#serializer-indentation
>
> Furthermore, I would make canonicalization an option if it's included
> at all. It imposes a significant performance hit since you have to
> sort the attributes and namespaces. Worse, it prevents full streaming
> since the attributes and namespaces have to be buffered before you
> sort them. But more importantly, probably half the time users don't
> care about canonicalization. The other half the time they do care. To
> be more specific they don't want it. It's too damn ugly and the lines
> are too long to work with. Plus there's no XML declaration, which
> users like.
i would make it an optional feature too.
> I think an XML output library needs to realize that opening files in a
> plain text editor is still a very important use case a lot of the
> time. Byte-by-byte comparison and digital signatures usually aren't
> (and when they are the digital signature library will canonicalize
> first). Requiring canonical XML and not pretty printing or allowing
> encoding selection does not give users the simple library that does
> what they need. It is not sufficiently full featured to hit the 80-20
> point.
>
maybe. but maybe there should be an API and more than one implementation
so users can chose what they need ...
thanks,
alek
--
The best way to predict the future is to invent it - Alan Kay
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