XML parsing techniques

[Peter Seibel]

Is there anyone out there who can characterize the problems/challenges/best
practices when it comes to parsing XML? Looking (briefly) at the source of
a couple parsers (Lark, Microsoft's, and XP) it looks like the parsers are
some flavor of hand written recursive descent. (Well, Lark has that funky
hand-coded DFA thing which I didn't really spend much time trying to grok
-- that's not really recursive descent as I understand things.) Is there a
reason no one seems to be using parser generators (like ANTLR or JavaCC)?
This may be more a question about the limitations of those tools which were
designed for parsing things that look a lot more like Algol than XML does.

-Peter

P.S. Are there any parsers out there that actually return DOM objects?

-- 
Peter Seibel          Perl/Java/English Hacker      peter at weblogic.com

                     Is Windows98 Y2K compliant? 



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