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Re: parser models

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: parser models
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 23:24:25 -0400
• In-reply-to: <p04330100b9b5868f62e9@[192.168.254.4]>

Elliotte writes about:
> That seems to me to fall into the same territory as caring about the 
> difference between character and entity references and CDATA 
> sections: it's relevant to one style of editors. It's really pretty 
> pointless for everything else. SAX, DOM, JDOM, XOM, etc. just aren't 
> really up to the needs of an source code based XML editor, but that's 
> OK. Source-obvious XML editors (i.e. programs like XML Spy that 
> expose the XML to the author but not programs like OpenOffice that 
> don't show the XML to the end user) are a use case with lots of 
> strange requirements that just aren't present in any other use case. 
> Adding the features necessary for editors would immensely complexify 
> an API for other, more common use cases. Editors justifiably need a 
> different API.

I'm not sure that I accept that the difference between "editor" APIs and
"processing" APIs is that clean-cut in practice, though there's
certainly a cultural divide between developers who are creating markup
by marking up information (which I think you're categorizing as
"editor") and developers who expect information to come prepackaged in
neat little boxes.

There's certainly room for both, but I'm definitely tired of working in
neat little boxes, whether or not I'm explicitly editing a document.

Hopefully some others may find it interesting to look beyond the box.


-------------
Simon St.Laurent - SSL is my TLA
http://simonstl.com may be my URI
http://monasticxml.org may be my ascetic URI
urn:oid:1.3.6.1.4.1.6320 is another possibility altogether

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
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    • From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@t...>

• References:
  • Re: parser models
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>

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