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Re: SAX startDocument and endDocument when there's onlya docum

• To: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Subject: Re: SAX startDocument and endDocument when there's onlya document fragment
• From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
• Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 16:34:48 +0100
• Cc: sax-devel@l..., xsl-list@l..., xml-dev@l..., jdom-interest@j...
• Organization: Expway
• References: <p04330105ba06971556db@[192.168.254.4]>
• Reply-to: robin.berjon@e...
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> Question: should the the transformer fire startDocument() and 
> endDocument() events? even though this isn't a complete document, only a 
> document fragment?
> 
> The SAX API doc is not absolutely clear on this point. However, my 
> interpretation is that yes, it should call startDocument() and 
> endDocument().

This might not be the answer you want to hear, but while I am loathe to add new 
methods I think that the cleanest way to do this would be to add 
startDocumentFragment() and endDocumentFragment(), and bump up the SAX rev. The 
default implementation might throw an exception on these. It could be 
conditioned to a feature defaulting to false.

The reasons for this are that:

  - ContentHandlers are entitled to believe that a document has only one 
beginning and one end, and that a document has only one root element. Defining 
behaviour post-hoc is likely to lead to breakage.

  - it may lead to intersting mappings with the DOM.

  - it would have other uses, such as signaling the fact that a fragment is 
being merged into a larger stream (ie it could be possible to use 
startDocumentFragment() in the middle of a stream -- again probably conditionned 
to the truthing of a feature). This might be because of an XInclude, or because 
of any other merging technique (eg the kind that is possible using 
XML::SAX::Machines). Such an event was already required by the PerlSAX community 
because it would be interesting to have specific behaviour within included 
fragments, for instance to deal with locally useful namespace normalisation.

-- 
Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
Research Engineer, Expway
7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE  8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488

• References:
  • SAX startDocument and endDocument when there's only a documentfragment
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>

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