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:

> I do most strongly urge you *not* to do this.  One of the great virtues
> of SAX is that it's straightforward to write SAX parsers that accept
> formats other than XML, and then allow the rest of the application
> to treat the input as XML.  There are already some very interesting
> SAX parsers out there: one that accepts WIN.INI format, for example.
> It would be easy to convert parts of Jing into a SAX parser for DTDs or
> for RELAX NG compact syntax.  I have myself written a SAX parser that
> understands phpwiki syntax and reports it as XHTML.  Because SAX is
> interface-based, making such parsers hot-pluggable is trivial.

That's a good use-case. I myself have written a JDBC reader that 
exposes SAX events from any SQL query. See 
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava/chapters/ch08s05.html
However, I wonder if I should move that functionality off into 
nu.xom.converters, either as part of SAXConverter or as a new class. 
I'd still like to not pollute the main nu.xom API with SAX classes if 
I can help it.

Also, doing this might give me a heads-up that the XMLReader is not 
really checking well-formedness and might be doing bad things like 
passing in C0 control characters. When I wrote my JDBC reader I was 
very careful to filter illegal characters. However, I'm not convinced 
everyone else is being equally careful.
--

  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