SAX2: AttributeList2 and EntityRefList

[David Megginson]

While we're polishing the details of LexicalHandler (which may yet
become DocumentHandler2 -- I'm still listening to arguments both
ways), I'd like to propose two new SAX2 support interfaces.


EntityRefList
-------------

This first interface is designed to work around a *very* nasty problem 
with XML 1.0 conformance, and at the same time, to enable the tracking 
of entity references in attribute values for the few masochists who
care.  As John Cowan has pointed out, the XML 1.0 REC requires that
processors report unexpanded entity references, and presumably that
applies to references in attribute values as well as elsewhere; as a
result, it is impossible to treat an XML attribute value simply as a
string.

On the other hand, almost nobody will every need this, so it's not
worth complicating the interface much for parser writers or for
application writers.

So, after some thought, here's what I came up with.  This is a special 
interface providing indexes to zero or more entity references in a
literal string (i.e. an attribute value).  The indices are based on
whatever array indices the programming language is using, exclusive of 
Unicode problems with combining characters, etc. (i.e. any
normalisation must already have taken place).

====================8<====================8<====================
// EntityRefList.java - list entity references in an attribute value.

package org.xml.sax;

public interface EntityRefList
{
    public int getLength ();
    public String getEntityName (int i);
    public int getEntityRefStart (int i);
    public int getEntityRefEnd (int i);
}

// end of EntityRefList.java
====================8<====================8<====================

The nice thing is that this lives outside of the String representing
the attribute value, so almost everyone can ignore it, and there
should be no performance hit.  It also provides nice
backwards-compatibility with SAX 1.0.



AttributeList2
--------------

Here's what I've come up with for lexical attribute information in
SAX2:

====================8<====================8<====================
// AttributeList2.java - SAX2 extensions for an attribute list

package org.xml.sax;

public interface AttributeList2 extends AttributeList
{
    public boolean isSpecified (int index);
    public boolean isSpecified (String name);
    public EntityRefList getEntityRefList (int index);
    public EntityRefList getEntityRefList (String name);
}

// end of AttributeList2.java
====================8<====================8<====================

This, together with the DTDDeclHandler interface I'll be describing in 
a separate posting, should provide enough information for full DOM
level one core attribute support.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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