XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Romain Deltour <romain.deltour AT inrialpes.fr>]

I think it would be really useful to allow subclasses override the 
Attribute.getValue() method, here is a use case:

say you want to write a subclass of Attribute to represent integer 
attributes (call it IntAttribute).
In order to avoid tons of string parsing, you want to store the core 
info in an int, and parse it back to a string only when you need to call 
the getValue() method (then sync'ing the int with the string value).

Cases where the specific string parsing are a lot more time-consuming 
exists, just take list values, where you will want to directly deal with 
lists in your subclasses rather than with strings.

My suggestion is to make getValue() overridable (and maybe to replace 
reading access to the 'private String value' field in the core class by 
calls to the getter, if we can afford a method call).

What do you think ?

Romain.