RFC: Simple XML Event-Based API for Java

[James Clark]

Paul Prescod wrote:

> XML attributes will probably have relative URLs in them and the XML
> Application will have to know how to resolve them.

This reminds me of another reason why you need positional information
even in a simple interface.

Suppose you have a document doc.xml that references an external parsed
entity chapters/3.xml and suppose chapters/3.xml contains some element
with an attribute that is a relative URL "4.xml".  I would claim that
the appropriate URL to use as the base for resolving that relative URL
is the URL of the resource that contains the URL, so that relative to
the document URL, that relative URL should be interpreted as
chapters/4.xml rather than 4.xml.  But unless the parser passes through
positional information, there's no way an application can do this.  I
think apps are going to need at least:

startExternalEntity(URL url)
endExternalEntity()

James


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