[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: YAXPAPI (Yet Another XML Parser API)- an XDEV proposal
At 09:59 13/12/97 -0800, Tim Bray wrote: >At 03:19 PM 13/12/97, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: > >I agree with Peter that we should just buckle down and get on with what used >to be known as XAPI. > >But my approach would be quite different. I think that the first step I'm missing something :-) Your approach below seems almost identical to what I was suggesting. >should be the end-user's API, the kind of thing that someone using a SMIL >or RDF processor would need. Such a person really doesn't want to wrestle >with entities and references and PIs and marked sections; all they want Agreed - and they wouldn't be in what I wanted as well. >is elements and attributes and the basic doctype info; they want the yup yup yup >processor to deal with entities and refs and quote marks and white space in >markup and encodings and so on. > >This would go a long way to address the whinings of the RDF & SMIL type >people, who thought XML just meant elements and attributes. I think that >from their point if view, it should be, all the other stuff in the syntax >is strictly to support authoring and management convenience. > >It should come in event-stream flavor and tree flavor. > >Minimal event stream API: > >1. Doctype, returns: root type, external subset system/public idents I would like the elements as well. If the parser doesn't do them, we just return null. But if it does... >2. Element start, returns: type, element name-value pairs, whether it's empty is "type" the elementType? This is the sort of terminological problem we have. >3. Text >4. End Element, returns: type > >Minimal tree API: > >1. Document, with methods: root type, system ID, public ID, root element >2. Element, with methods: parent, children, attributeValueByName, allAttributes >3. Attribute, with methods: name, value >4. Text (presumably hiding lazy evaluation) Sounds OK. > >I acknowledge this is grossly insufficient for basing an editor on. You want I don't want much for an editor. Just the attribute stuff and contentspec. I don't want PE's, comments, marked sections and so on. >that, use the DOM. Only a few choices have design implications: > >1. How are children returned; possibilities would be to have Element and > Text crammed into the same class with a method for asking which is which, > or have separate Text and Element classes, then children returns an Object > array or a Vector, and you can find out what kind of child each member > is using the instanceof operator. I favor the latter, Lark does this I'm easy - **as long as we all agree** > >2. Whether it's worthwhile putting children into, as opposed to a native > array or Vector, a special ChildList class with enumerator and indexing > so you can hide a lazy-evaluation behind it. I favor the latter, the which is 'the latter'? :-) > DOM does this but Lark doesn't. > >3. Whether the processor should be required to coalesce adjacent Text > objects. Suppose you have <a>foo <!--comment--> bar &ref; <?pi?>baz</a>, > it's immensely less work if the processor can give this to the app > as 4 Text chunks. I think most of the processors do this now. I don't have a problem here... > >If I formalized and published this, it would look a lot like part of >Lark's interface, but I bet all the other parsers could implement it. >Should I? -Tim I bet they could. It is very important, however, that everyone agrees on the terminology. I have never seen this as a difficult problem. I think it would take a week to come up with a reasonable working draft. I hope that XML-DEVers will see the value of a simple interface and not - as has happened before - keep getting more and more complex. the three parsers we have are simple - it's a slightly depressing situation that we haven't got an interface for them to use. I suggest that Tim goes ahead, but I'll also produce my interface from the spec. After all, that will show what the *consumer* (i.e. JUMBO) would like. As always I shall be happy to junk anything I do if it helps us make progress :-) It might also be useful for us to set ourselves a deadline. P. Peter Murray-Rust, Director Virtual School of Molecular Sciences, domestic net connection VSMS http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms, Virtual Hyperglossary http://www.venus.co.uk/vhg xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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