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RE: DOM or SAX: Sense and Sensibility

• To: Al Snell <alaric@a...>
• Subject: RE: DOM or SAX: Sense and Sensibility
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 13:33:43 -0600
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

The next stage of this seems to be people who 
don't like or can't understand XSLT, so they 
use it in a SAX-like way and call script functions 
for everything else.

I'm curious about this subject because 
I keep seeing people who learn just the barebones, 
get to DOM, then use it for everything.  One 
of our folks, a smart lady, started doing 
some tests to check resources and memory usage 
and concluded that for her app, the DOM was of 
no value at all.  I asked her if she had looked 
at SAX and she didn't know what it was.  She was 
at least asking good questions.  What we are finding 
elsewhere is that they don't bother with that. 
They run to code and reinvent everything.  So, 
I am wondering if others are seeing the same 
behavior.  Is XML just that hard to learn, 
too obscure, too different, or is this just 
ossification brought on by years of copying 
code and not looking beneath? 

len


From: Al Snell [mailto:alaric@a...]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> How often do you as experienced XML developers
> find people in your shop using DOM for work
> more appropriate to SAX?   Have you asked
> them why and what do they say?  What are the
> costs of picking the wrong API?

Even worse, one I've seen in processing pipelines is converting to textual
XML (as a big in-memory string) then passing it into the next stage to be
reparsed!

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