Re: [boost] Proposal: XML APIs in boost

From: Stefan Seefeld (seefeld_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-03 14:55:00

Jose wrote:
> On 11/1/05, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
>>* The Implementation uses existing libraries (libxml2, to be specific),
>>since writing a XML DOM library requires substantial efford.
>>
>>
> 
> Do you plan to support event-based parsing (SAX-like) ?

That's a good question. My initial proposal a couple of years ago had
a SAX API. However, SAX has a number of shortcomings that make it hard
or inapropriate to use (e.g., no namespaces !).

A better API that still follows the cursor-style approach from SAX,
is the XMLReader. It uses a pull model instead of push, i.e. there
are no callbacks, but instead the application advances the reader's
internal cursor to the next 'token'.
See http://xmlsoft.org/xmlreader.html for a comparison to SAX.

If there is enough interest I could add a boost::xml::reader API,
though dom and reader are completely independent, as far as the API
itself is concerned.

Regards,
                Stefan