XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

Michael Kay wrote:

> The fact that this is documented as a non-conformance means by definition
> that I'm not happy with the situation and would like to fix it eventually.
> My thinking is that it should be done in the same layer that does
> "stripping" (really, skipping) of whitespace text nodes. The main difficulty
> is that it's one of those areas where the last 1% of conformance can cost
> you 10% in performance, and users don't necessarily find that the right
> trade-off. (Microsoft's MSXML3, running against a DOM, has never merged
> adjacent text nodes, and this doesn't seem to cause many problems.)

I'll pay the 10% in performance to get 1% in correctness.

> Rather than having Saxon create virtual text nodes to represent a sequence
> of adjacent XOM text nodes, I think it would be better if XOM had an option
> to merge adjacent text nodes as soon as they are added to the tree.

That still relies on users to set the option. I'll have to look at the 
interface between XOM and SAXON you and Wolfgang wrote, but is it 
possible that we could break the assumption that a single XOM object is 
a single SAXON Node? Could several XOM objects make up a SAXON node?

OK. I've looked at the code and it seems like we could wrap an array or 
list of several Text objects as a single SAXON Node. However, I'm not 
sure how we'd feed the document into SAXON inn the first place. Where's 
the class that reads through a XOM Document and wraps everything? We 
might need to change that too so that if it saw consecutive text nodes 
it accumulated them into a list before wrapping, rather than wrapping 
each one individually.

This might require some changes to Saxon internals but it should help 
out with JDOM as well. What about DOM? Does SAXON also not merge 
adjacent text nodes there?

--
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
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