Re: [Caml-list] Common XML interface

[Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>]

Am Donnerstag, den 21.04.2005, 08:59 +0200 schrieb Alain Frisch:
> Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 09:22:23AM +0200, Alain Frisch wrote:
> > 
> >>It would be great to have some common interface. An event-driven 
> >>interface is probably easier to agree upon. There are many points to 
> > 
> > 
> > Even if certainly easier to agree upon, event-driven interface for XML
> > are harder to program than tree based ones.
> 
> Some applications really need stream based processing: loading the XML 
> document into memory is out of question (because it is huge) and/or 
> processing needs to happen as soon as data is available (e.g. for the 
> Jabber protocol).
> 
> > Basic tree operations should not be that hard to agree upon ...
> 
> I'm afraid it will be hard. To start with, do we want mutable trees, 
> upward pointers ?  Do we want to keep locations, namespace declarations, 
> comments, entity references ... ?  Which whitespace to remove ?

For a standard representation we should use DOM, simply because lots of
XML standards refer to DOM. Of course, that doesn't answer all details.

> Anyway, a tree representation can easily be built on top of an 
> event-driven interface. The difficult part in parsing XML is really 
> lexing. We can try to agree upon one or several standard tree 
> representation, but I believe we should start with an event-driven 
> interface.

And it is much simpler.

> Is someone willing to set-up a mailing list for this discussion ?

I have set up a mailing list:

https://gps.dynxs.de/mailman/listinfo/xml-list

I would suggest we wait until Monday before starting the discussion so
everybody can sign up who is interested.

Gerd
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Gerd Stolpmann * Viktoriastr. 45 * 64293 Darmstadt * Germany 
gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de          http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
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