[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Announcement: SAX Java Implementation (pre-release)
Tim Bray writes: > At 05:31 PM 12/04/98 -0400, David Megginson wrote: > > > 1. Why has a SAX prefix been added to all classes? > > > >There are a few benefits to this decision: > > Kind of unconvincing, I'd have to say. If someone doesn't have it > together enough to figure out how to use java packages they're > not going to have much luck with SAX anyhow. And we really shouldn't > be worrying about legacy SAX implementatoins at this stage; we're > all bleeding-edge types around here. And if somebody > wants a C binding, that's going to be different enough from > Java SAX anyhow that we shouldn't do the SAX prefix just because > they're going to have to. If no one wants this, I will happily remove it. If you do want the "SAX..." prefix on all interfaces, please speak up now. > > > 3. The interface for reading character streams needs more > > > specification if it is to be interoperable. > > > > > a) There's a critical ambiguity in the concept of a character stream: > > > a Java concept of a char does not correspond to the XML concept of a > > > character. > >What does everyone else think about this point? Is this a good case > >for pragmatism over logical consistency, or am I introducing an ugly > >kludge that will come back to haunt us all? > > Is it maybe the right thing to be brutally clear and just have a UTF-16 > character stream? I haven't looked at Java chars as closely as James > has, but his description sounds exactly like UTF-16. A 16-bit UTF-16 > quantity is not precisely a character, but the places where it isn't > (non BMP chars) exhibit graceful degradation; if the app knows about > UTF-16 it does the right thing, otherwise it looks like two unknown > characters, nothing breaks. Fair enough -- we could specify that SAXCharacterStream is a UTF-16 stream, or we could even name it SAXUTF16Stream. How will this interact with Larry Wall's decision to use UTF-8 as the internal encoding for the next Perl? > > > b) Is it legal for a byte order mark character to be present at the > > > start of the character stream? The right answer is that it should not > > > be legal: this should be stripped out in the byte to character > > > conversion process. > > > >This is a tricky point. I had planned to leave it in -- what is the > >default behaviour for java.io.Reader (and for other languages with > >character streams)? > > No; if there's a BOM, that should be eaten by the underlying char stream > machinery, which should read it and thereafter transparently swap bytes > or not to produce Java chars without the app having to work at it. > The spec is clear on this point, and at one with sensible implementation > practice. Should we require all versions to use the Java byte order, or only the Java version? > > > 6. I strongly object to including the name argument in > > > SAXEntityResolver.resolveEntity. There's nothing in XML that says > > > that the name should be used in resolving an entity and so there's no > > > reason to suppose a parser will make it available. I also think it's > > > wrong in principle to make use of it. This business with "[document]" > > > and "[dtd]" is gross. At the very least the spec should say that name > > > maybe null if this information is not available. > > > >I'm neutral on this point, though I do agree that "[document]" and > >"[dtd]" are ugly. Does anyone object to the removal of the name > >argument? > > I'm with James - any use of the entity name by an application is > potentially actively harmful, nuke it. -Tim That's two 'nays' and one abstention (mine). If anyone wants to keep the entity name argument, please put your case forward quickly. Thanks, and all the best, David -- David Megginson ak117@f... Microstar Software Ltd. dmeggins@m... http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/ 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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