relation between DOM, SAX, and Schema?

[Mark D. Anderson]

This current thread regarding data vs. API prompts a few
questions I've had for a while.

1. Is the difference between DOM and SAX one of programming
style only (implementation efficiency aside)?
http://www.megginson.com/SAX/event.html seems to say so.
Or is there more to it than "trees vs. events": that SAX
is in the end a driver API that must accomodate anything
a low-level parser wants to offer, while in the end DOM
is a least-common-denominator procedural model for browsers?

2. How does/will metadata affect either?
Once the many XML-based schema proposals (DCD, XSchema, etc.)
are consolidated, when I parse some XML with respect to a schema,
I would like my annotated tree (grove, whatever) to be able to tell me
meta-info about the nodes using that schema (what is its default, is
this optional, what is the description string for this data type
or this element type, etc.). I would like to use the very same API
to ask questions not just about element values, but about the
element metadata as well. It seems that right now neither
DOM nor SAX is ready for this?

-mda





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