Sun is forking SAX

Sun has recently posted the second proposed final draft of Java 
Specification Request 172, J2ME Web Services Specification:

http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/first/jsr172/index2.html

This draft is much improved in terms of XML conformance. It no longer 
appears to subset XML. However, it does subset SAX in several very 
incompatible ways. In particular,

*   Sun is using the confusing, underspecified SAXParser and 
SAXParserFactory instead of the much cleaner, better specified 
XMLReader and XMLReaderFactory.

* Sun has removed the ContentHandler interface and replaced it with 
the DefaultHandler adapter class.

There are lots of other interfaces and classes that have been 
removed. However, these two strike me as the most objectionable. This 
subset is going to make it difficult to port standard SAX code to 
J2ME environments. It's also going to encourage developers to 
continue use the seriously confusing and broken (e.g. non-namespace 
aware by default) SAXParser instead of the better XMLReader.

This draft is tantalizingly close to something useful, but there's 
still work that remains to be done. Comments can be sent to 

-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   
   Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA