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Re: RE: Penance for misspent attributes

• To: xml-dev@l..., Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...>
• Subject: Re: RE: Penance for misspent attributes
• From: Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@e...>
• Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 10:56:41 -0500
• In-reply-to: <5.1.0.14.0.20020517091553.037438d8@m...>
• Organization: OMS Development

5/17/02 3:28:33 AM, Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@p...> wrote:

>There is more to it than a buffer. Parsers can and do emit chunks of content
>at boundaries that suit themselves. So
>
><foo>
>Hello world
></foo>
>
>is not guaranteed to produce 1 data event that can be slurped into a buffer in
>one go. More generally, in the presence of mixed content there will definitely
>be multiple chunks. So you end up with this pattern:
>
>start_foo:
>	buffer = ""
>	inFoo = 1
>
>end_foo:
>	print buffer
>
>characters (chunk):
>	if inFoo:
>		buffer.append (chunk)
>
>This rapidly gets out of hand.
>
>Rightly, the need for this pattern drives the data-heads nuts. It would be 
>soo nice to
>know that in the presence of data-oriented XML, the fundamental parser 
>layer would
>emit complete PCDATA chunks.
>
>Trouble is, there is no consensus on what data-oriented XML is and how
>it could be flagged to a processor. Consequently, data-oriented APIs that
>avoid that above unside-down and state-space-laden constructs
>such as RAX (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/04/26/rax) cannot go
>anywhere.
>
>An XML Features Manifest would be one way to flag it
>(http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/xml-dev-Dec-1999/0002.html)
>but that never went anywhere either:-)

An even simpler alternative is a SAX filter that does nothing but condense consecutive PCDATA 
events.  Such a thing exists, for example, in the Perl world as XML::Filter::BufferText.  That way, 
you don't have to flag anything to the processor, you just read its output through a pair of 
appropriately-tinted glasses.

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