Roll-Your-Own Parsers (was: Re: What Clean Specs Achieve)

[Tyler Baker]

Bill la Forge wrote:

> From: Simon St.Laurent <simonstl at simonstl.com>
> >If we could work with parser layers rather than parsers, this might become
> >a lot easier to manage.  We could just turn on the parts we need and turn
> >off the ones we don't.
>
> We've been continuing our effort to add filters to MDSAX and in the process
> ran into a small problem--the runtime was loading all the filters specifiec in the context
> boot document. The next release fixes this, so that only the filters actually being
> used get loaded.
>
> Anyway, the point here is that a reasonable approach to dynamic configuration
> should give you a very small footprint when only selected features are used.
> This in contrast to a does-everything monolithic parser. And as the specs
> mature, it seems likely that the larger companies represented at the W3C
> have no reason at all to keep the specs small and lightweight--cumbersom
> specs nicely eliminates much of the competition!
>
> So it seems the choice is clear... expect your parsers to grow till they have more
> features than MS Word, or take a configurable approach which allows the developer
> to select the capabilities necessary for the job at hand.

Sad but true, but this is not the parser writer's fault as we are almost completely obligated
to support everything in a W3C recommendation to call ourselve's compliant.  I am wondering if
you will be able to call an XML framework compliant if it elects to omit namespaces support or
any future technical headache that is thrown at us developers.

Tyler


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