[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SAX, Java, and Namespaces (was Re: Restricted Namespaces for XML)
David Megginson wrote: > Tyler Baker writes: > > > If SAX were to make a simple requirement that all strings that > > represent symbols (like names) were to be interned then things > > would be a lot cheaper. The same can be said of the DOM as well. > > The problem is that Java's own intern is so terribly inefficient that > no serious parser writer will use it (most of them have their own, > custom interns). As of JDK 1.1.6 things are not so bad and Java 2 is a bit better as interned Strings are under the hood managed using Weak References. It could be made better in the JDK though. I suspect if they made a real effort in the Java 2 JVM they could make string interns at least twice as fast as things currently are. Nevertheless, string interning is a one time cost so lets put that in perspective here. > Even then, you wouldn't get any help with the "xmlns:" prefix > matching, which is the costliest part. The most efficient way to do Very true (ouch, ouch, ouch)... > namespace processing is directly in the parser (which has to look at > every attribute name anyway), but my own tests have shown that filter > layer on top of SAX isn't too bad. Unfortunately as in the case with all XML or XSL benchmarks, the test data can vary enormously. If you have documents that have few elements with attributes (except of course namespace attributes), then things probable will not be so bad. However, if you have lots of attributes in elements, then you need to check every single attribute to see if it starts with "xmlns:" (ouch, ouch, ouch). So I suppose we should no encourage document designers to model data only as character content in elements and only use attributes for ID's and namespaces declarations. For types like a rectangle, I think using attributes makes a lot more sense in the general case, but in the presence of "Namespaces in XML" I would change things from: <Rectangle x="0" y="1" width="59" height="23"> to: <myprefix:Rectangle xmlns:myprefix="YabbaDabbaDoo"> <myprefix:x> 0 </myprefix:x> <myprefix:y> 1 </myprefix:y> <myprefix:width> 59 </myprefix:width> <myprefix:height> 23 </myprefix:height> </myprefix:Rectangle> The really sad thing about this is that there tends to be a feeling among a lot of people that meaningful prefixes do not matter at all. If XML is ever going to be editable by an average internet user for some common tasks, meaningful prefixes do matter. Tyler 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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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