From: David Alan Black <dblack@...>
Date: 2001-11-16T10:53:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:25370] Re: XML support in the standard lib;whatexactly?

Hi --

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, James Britt (rubydev) wrote:

> It's interesting to look at how SAX and SAX2 have been implemented
> in other languages. Despite there being no W3C TR, or even anything
> like a formal spec, people tend to provide the same classes (or the
> equivalent) and APIs as in the Java "reference" version. Even the
> Microsoft parser implements SAX and SAX2, with matching objects and
> methods.
>
> It suggests that there is sort of "common law" approach to XML APIs;
> once something has established itself among the XML community, it
> can be fruitful to build on it.
>
> People act "as if" there were a language-independent API definition
> for SAX; perhaps there's some benefit to this.

I think one thing also that we've lost sight of in some of this
discussion is precisely that SAX is not itself a parser, but is an API
which (arbitrarily many) parsers can implement.  So in a sense, the
discussion about whether a SAX parser should be included in the Ruby
distribution, etc., skips over the question of defining a SAX
interface for Ruby.

I'm looking again at the SAX2 interface, and wondering whether it
might perhaps be worthwhile just mapping it onto Ruby.  In fact, I
think I'll give it a try....  Don't hold your collective breath :-)
but I'm curious to experiment with it.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav