APIs vs Markup

[Don Park]

>Hmm ... it sound like what you're looking for is a common API, not a
>common markup language.  There's no reason that someone couldn't write
>a SAX driver that took

True enough except there is a genuine problem of using XML to encode
data with no obvious root element.  For example, log data tends to
just accumulate and one has to use XML hacks to make the data meet
the root element constraint.  Best one can do is use the data as
well-formed external parsed entity.  I am not really obsessed about
this but it is somewhat annoying.

As far as APIs are concerned, I feel that APIs should pay more
attention to XML fragments handling.  Some parsers will parse
only XML documents.  Even SAX API's startDocument/endDocument
tend to make people think in terms of XML documents rather than
arbituary XML fragments.  Many people write SAX filters that expects
startDocument/startElement/.../endElement/endDocument sequence when
there is no real reason to.  I, for one, had some filters that
initialized on startDocument or first startElement which leaves
the filter in odd state when XML fragments are being parsed.

I am not really criticizing anyone here since I forgot to bring
this up when we were designing SAX (that reminds me, when will the
work on SAX 2 stuff be resumed?).  Lets just think about XML
fragments more when designing APIs from now on.

Best,

Don Park    -   mailto:donpark at docuverse.com
Docuverse   -   http://www.docuverse.com


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