It occurred to me that it might be possible to design this as some sort
of iterator interface like DOM's NodeIterator. Streaming implementations
would only be able to walk this in a forward fashion. Then there could
be a tree-based subclass of this interface that added methods for moving
backwards, and along the independent axes. i.e. something like:
IterableSource extends Source
NavigableSource extends IterableSource
An engine that wanted to build its own object model anyway, as for
example, Xalan does when working on top of DOM, would always use
IterableSource. An engine that did not want to provide its own model,
and could not work in a streaming fashion, would require a
NavigableSource instead.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
