[XOM-interest] Exposing XMLHandler

Elliotte Harold elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Fri Sep 28 04:20:48 EDT 2007


Thomas Hicks wrote:

> I understand your motives but sometimes you have to bend your
> noble principles for pragmatism. I'm stuck, for example, trying
> to integrate XOM (which I really like) into this 3rd party application.

And yet I still don't have details of what that application is or why 
anyone needs to do this. I try to keep the public API footprint minimal. 
  No API is added without clear and compelling use cases. So far I 
haven't seen such a use case.

Two people have said they want this. Fine, but does anyone actually need 
it? That point has not been proven or quantified. More often than  not 
when someone says they need a particular feature, there's already 
another way to do what they're trying to do.

> And note that Mr. Guttierez resorted to some clever (and possibly
> dangerous?) workaround. How many other programmers will
> just do that, with possibly bad results? Perhaps you could take
> another look at the problem and come up with a "safe",
> XOM-oriented solution for us all.

Right now I'm leaning toward figuring out a way to prevent exposing the 
XOMHandler class from the user-supplied XMLReader. Barring that I may 
have to take another look at XMLHandler and make sure it's safe for this 
sort of use.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo at metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/


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