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RE: Penance for misspent attributes


RE:  Penance for misspent attributes

 >I don't know. XML modellers faq:
 >Q: Why are you putting stuff in attributes?
 >A: I can't be arsed to code a buffer.

There is more to it than a buffer. Parsers can and do emit chunks of content
at boundaries that suit themselves. So

<foo>
Hello world
</foo>

is not guaranteed to produce 1 data event that can be slurped into a buffer in
one go. More generally, in the presence of mixed content there will definitely
be multiple chunks. So you end up with this pattern:

start_foo:
	buffer = ""
	inFoo = 1

end_foo:
	print buffer

characters (chunk):
	if inFoo:
		buffer.append (chunk)

This rapidly gets out of hand.

Rightly, the need for this pattern drives the data-heads nuts. It would be 
soo nice to
know that in the presence of data-oriented XML, the fundamental parser 
layer would
emit complete PCDATA chunks.

Trouble is, there is no consensus on what data-oriented XML is and how
it could be flagged to a processor. Consequently, data-oriented APIs that
avoid that above unside-down and state-space-laden constructs
such as RAX (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/04/26/rax) cannot go
anywhere.

An XML Features Manifest would be one way to flag it
(http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/xml-dev-Dec-1999/0002.html)
but that never went anywhere either:-)

Oh well.

Sean


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