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Re: SAX LexicalHandler::comment issue

• From: David Brownell <david-b@p...>
• To: Rob Lugt <roblugt@e...>, xml-dev@l...
• Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2001 10:00:49 -0700

> What are other peoples thoughts?  Is it worth proposing
> startComment()/comment()/endComment() for SAX x.x?

I tend to think not; what's the real win to changing that API?
There's a measurable cost to changing APIs that are widely
deployed ... I can't see an offsetting benefit.

I'd rather discourage folk from using comments in applications,
actually ... :)  So far as I know, the primary use case for reporting
comments is to support DOM bells'n'whistles.  And W3C is,
finally, looking at ways to disable such noise there.

There's a similar issue with reporting PIs ... the data passed to
the target can be arbitrarily large.  Any application that really
cares about the content of comments should really be using PIs
instead.  (Text editors aside -- and those can't really be using
"Application" programming interfaces.) 

On the other hand, I can't see worrying that names for elements,
attributes, entities, and notations have no size limits, which is
the other main place that SAX expects data to be string-ized.

- Dave

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