XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

Michael Kay wrote:

> The same nice properties could have been achieved if � were allowed as a
> character reference, in the same way as  is now allowed. 

Not really. Many APIs including SAX and DOM decode the character 
references into real characters before presenting them to the client 
application. In fact, I think doing anything else would be very strange. 
While there might not be any embedded nulls in the original source, 
there very well could be embedded nulls in the strings the APIs present 
to clients. This would be a major hassle for C and other languages that 
use null delimited strings.

XML is text, all text, and nothing but text. It's completely reasonable 
to expect that a language's native text handling functions should be 
able to work with XML data.

--
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim