SAX2: Proposed alternative DTD interface

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* David Megginson
|
| Here's another alternative for SAX2: forget about trying to report
| DTD declarations as events, and simply make the whole DTD available
| through an interface with a Parser2.get() call.
 
I'm against this. Having an event-based/object-based dichotomy makes
sense for DTDs just as it does for document instances. Also, this
breaks with the rest of SAX, is relatively complex and will at some
point probably be in direct competition with the DOM Level X.

Parsers that already have an internal object representation of the DTD
will need to wrap that with this interface, which probably won't be a
a very nice job, while an adapter for the event-based interface should
be simple.

Furthermore, this can be built on top of a 100% event-based SAX2.

And, finally, I dislike the iterators. They are just a nuisance in
higher-level languages, and a plain array would probably be better.
It would also free us from all this casting.

I say do it, but on top of an event-based interface, outside of the
SAX2 core and preferably without the iterators. A nice addition might
be support for content model automatons. (Three methods are needed:
get_start_state, get_next_state and is_final_state.)

--Lars M.


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