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RE: Partyin' like it's 1999

• To: "'Elliotte Harold'" <elharo@m...>,"'Dare Obasanjo'" <dareo@m...>
• Subject: RE: Partyin' like it's 1999
• From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@n...>
• Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 08:37:32 +0100
• Cc: "'Joshua Allen'" <joshuaa@m...>,<xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <4180335B.1070801@m...>
• Thread-index: AcS8fxkH8ZgTSD5JSmeBGaSpiSXfDgAQFslA

> However, I have never seen a single element in a real-world 
> XML document 
> which had so many attributes that streaming the attributes 
> one at a time 
> would have been practical help worth the additional complexity that 
> would be imparted to the API by such a solution. You're 
> trying to solve 
> a problem that doesn't exist in practice; or if it does exist, is so 
> rare as to not be worth solving.

Like many things with namespaces, it's a problem for the parser suppliers
but not really for the users.

It was pointed out to me yesterday (by way of a Saxon bug report) that
Crimson still exhibits the bug from the original SAX2 distribution, whereby
an attribute using a particular prefix is reported with the namespace
associated with that prefix in the parent element in preference to a
namespace associated with the same prefix in a subsequent namespace
declaration in the same start tag. Obviously the Crimson developers decided
this was so rare as to be not worth solving - fixing it would certainly be a
slight performance hit for the 99.9 of users who never redeclare prefixes,
for the sake of the 1% who do. 

But my own philosophy (like yours, Elliotte) is that correctness always
comes first, however rare the scenario; and I also try to live by the
principle that a clean API is more important than a 2% performance
improvement. If you want a 2% performance improvement, just wait for next
week's hardware.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

• Follow-Ups:
  • RE: Partyin' like it's 1999
    • From: Rich Salz <rsalz@d...>

• References:
  • Re: Partyin' like it's 1999
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>

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