XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>]

At 5:02 PM -0400 10/10/03, John Cowan wrote:

> Why not?  Granted, such a parser will not pass the test suite, but
> it may have utility in appropriate circumstances.  If you are trying
> to process documents from a variety of sources that come in over the
> transom with possible external subsets, which you do *not* wish to
> depend on, then turning off external subset loading is very sensible.
> You may fail to get the default attributes that the author expected,
> but the documents will at least be processable.

It's more than that it will not pass the test suite. The biggest 
issue is that XOM, like XPath, assumes that all entity references 
have been expanded, period. It has no support for skipped entities, 
and that's a deliberate design decision. Off the top of my head, I'm 
not even sure what would happen if a parser called skippedEntity. 
Probably, nothing and the entity would silently vanish (a bad thing, 
IMO). However, it might corrupt the build or toss an exception that 
shuts down the entire program.

> In some circumstances, speed is simply more important than conformance
> to the last detail of the XML Rec.  XOM should not make the use of fast
> buggy parsers impossible.

I simply disagree on this point. If it's buggy, it's broken. Doing 
the wrong thing a thousand times faster is not helpful.
--

  Elliotte Rusty Harold
  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
  Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
  http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA