The SAX interface of the xml4c2 parser

[Steinar Bang]

I've taken a look at the SAX interface of the IBM xml4c2 parser
        http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xml4c

In short, I don't like it.

I don't like returning "const XMLCh*" instead of "const wstring&" or
"const string&" (even though an approach like this would be more
efficient for an expat wrapper).  I don't need the index out of range
warning capability, because I iterate through the AttributeList
entries anyway.

I don't like giving an AttributeList& argument to
DocumentHandler::startElement(), instead of an AttributeList*, because 
this rules out the possibility of passing a null-pointer on for the
cases that don't have an attribute list.

Hm... so far there is AFAIK 4 incompatible C++ SAX implementations
around.  The IBM one, and:
        http://www.jezuk.demon.co.uk/SAX/
        http://www.cgocable.net/~mlepage/minion/doc/
        http://www.vivid-creations.com/free/sax.h

I also have an expat-wrapper-based C++ SAX implementation, similar to
Jez Higgins' one (I use a "sax_" prefix instead of namespaces, since
it has to run on compilers without namespace support).  No time to
create a web page for it yet.

My reasons for going SAX, was:
 1. it seemed silly to invent my own abstraction when lots of work had 
    already gone into the SAX design
 2. make it possible to drop-in replace the parser

But #2 can only be achieved if the different SAX implementations have
the same API, and this is not currently the case.

I'll go whatever way the majority goes, unless it leads towards the
IBM implementation.

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
unsubscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)