API versioning in SAX

Fri Jul 31 00:06:35 BST 1998

I just started leaning XML so correct me if I'm wrong here.

I think it's a great idea!

Since SAX is actually a SIMPLE API for XML,
it helps a lot if we have some functions like:

public String getValue( String ItemName, String DocumentName, ... );
public boolean putValue( String Value, String ItemName, String Document...);

Just compare to those registry access functions,
they are very handy.

:)

----------------------------------
January Tsai
FedEx - Power Ship at Dallas
jctsai at fedex.com

-----Original Message-----
From:	Dean Roddey [SMTP:roddey at us.ibm.com]
Sent:	Thursday, July 30, 1998 4:37 PM
To:	xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Subject:	API versioning in SAX

This leads to another thought -- that we probably need some kind of a
hook for requesting and/or querying parser features.  This issue came
up before during the initial SAX 1.0 design.  Something like the
following might be appropriate:

  package org.xml.sax;

  public interface Parser {
    ...
    public boolean hasFeature (String featureName);
    public boolean requestFeature (String featureName, boolean status);
  }

It is important to note that with such an approach, there would have
to be a registry of feature names in addition to the SAX interface.

Wouldn't it be better to just allow the current API version to be queried? The
above scheme would probably encourage a little too much "a la carte' type of
feature support, wouldn't it? If you allow stick to being able to query what
level of the API the parser supports, that would be a simpler, cleaner way to
know whether the underlying parser can do what you need to do.

Just a thought...

----------------------------------------
Dean Roddey
Software Weenie
IBM Center for Java Technology - Silicon Valley
roddey at us.ibm.com

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