Re: [xml-dev] Never mind the browser, let's do MicroXML

[Michael Sokolov <sokolov@ifactory.com>]

On 12/18/2010 8:05 AM, Michael Kay wrote:
>
>>
>> PS: probably everyone on this list is already aware of this, but SAX 
>> stands for Simple API for XML.  To support MicroXML, we would want an 
>> even simpler one; Micro-API: MAX? uAX?.
>
> Have you tried XMLStreamWriter? As an event-based push API, it's a 
> delight to use compared to SAX, whether you're sending or receiving.

As it turns out I only very recently implemented some xml-aware 
full-text indexing using woodstox; as you say, I was drawn to it because 
I needed a pull parser.  So I worked with XMLStreamReader. It wasn't 
obvious to me how to use XmlStreamWriter as an event-base push API.  I 
guess one could implement an event sink as an XmlStreamWriter, but then 
what?  Is there some existing glue to connect a Reader to a Writer, or 
does one need to implement that?

Also, to return to the point in my original post: it wasn't so much a 
criticism of SAX, as much as to say that folks working with a simplified 
document format might prefer to have a simplified API that isn't 
peppered with hooks for legacy (XML 1.0) features.  But is it really 
worth the trouble to produce new micro- versions of all these XML APIs 
that would simply eliminate CDATA, DOCTYPE, namespaces, etc?  Especially 
if namespaces are to be reintroduced later?

-Mike