anti-goals

[Matthew Gertner]

Peter,

Thanks for your reply. Having said that SAX is essentially useless for us
right now, I would like to clarify my point of view. I am *very* sympathetic
with the goals of SAX. I can see tons of applications areas unrelated to our
SGML work where POET, for example, could effectively use XML for metadata,
configuration information, import/export, etc., as per the officially stated
SAX goals. I am sure this will be the primary usage area for XML, in terms
of number of users.

My point should have been that it will be easier to nip ongoing discussions
about supported features in the bud if there is an "officially" stated
intention to provide an advanced interface as well. I would like to sit down
and write down some of our requirements for a "repository loader" interface
(no doubt very similar to a DOM builder), but I see the danger of losing
focus at this point. I remember the date January 12th floating around as the
deadline for some concrete SAX implementations. Would this be an appropriate
time to make some more detailed comments about an extended interface?

One other issue: if there is any kind of general agreement that a more
advanced interface, derived from SAX; would be a worthwhile area for future
work, then the use of a well-defined set of interfaces (David Megginson's
proposal) is very much to be preferred. Extensibility is the primary goal of
good design. Sure there are some pragmatic issues with downloading class
files, but a) this only has to be done once per parser and b) every Java
application is going to have this problem and concrete solutions are already
planned.

Cheers,

Matthew

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Murray-Rust <peter at ursus.demon.co.uk>
To: Matthew Gertner <matthewg at poet.de>; xml-dev Mailing List
<xml-dev at ic.ac.uk>
Date: Tuesday, January 06, 1998 10:11 PM
Subject: Re: anti-goals


<snip>

>Thanks. This more or less sums up my own feelings. A line has to be drawn
>somewhere.
>
>>
>>SAX - for capturing logical structure
>>AAX - for capturing logical and physical structure. Sufficient
functionality
>>to build a document object as specified by the DOM.
>
>If SAX is seen as a part of a continuing process, this seems a possible
>division . I certainly expect that *as a result of using SAX* there may
>need to be some tweaks later, and that we shall find out how easy it is to
>build other things on top.
>
>Personally (I think) I need more than the logical structure, but I'm
>certain that there are a lot of newcomers to XML who do not have a
>background in document analysis and management and who will only need the
>logical structure.



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