Re: [boost] Proposal: XML APIs in boost

From: Jose (jmalv04_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-09 05:45:29

On 11/9/05, Graham Bennett <graham-boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> IMO a streaming interface is much more important than DOM as a starting
> point - one can easily and efficiently build a DOM from a stream, but
> starting with an in-memory representation of a document usually
> precludes streaming. There are a number of XML applications where it is
> not desirable or possible to hold the entire document in memory at once.
> A reader interface has advantages over SAX in that it is much easier to
> program with. It's very easy to do things like implement decorators
> around readers, and to write generic code that just understands how to
> use a reader and doesn't care how the XML is actually stored.

I completely agree. I think the basic interface should be a reader
interface.
Also as per my previous post, this basic interface would not have any
dependencies
on external libraries like libxml2, which I think is very bad for a boost
library, not to
mention the licensing issues !

I think a very simple way to look at this is based on the XML file size

reader API --> any file
SAX API --> any file
DOM API --> small files in memory

So we should start with the general solution and build on top of that. Also,
has anybody check
the Spirit XML examples.

wouldn't a reader API + spirit give an entry point to a big percentage of
the XML problem domain ?