Re: [Caml-list] Common XML interface

[Alain Frisch <Alain.Frisch@inria.fr>]

Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 09:22:23AM +0200, Alain Frisch wrote:
> 
>>It would be great to have some common interface. An event-driven 
>>interface is probably easier to agree upon. There are many points to 
> 
> 
> Even if certainly easier to agree upon, event-driven interface for XML
> are harder to program than tree based ones.

Some applications really need stream based processing: loading the XML 
document into memory is out of question (because it is huge) and/or 
processing needs to happen as soon as data is available (e.g. for the 
Jabber protocol).

> Basic tree operations should not be that hard to agree upon ...

I'm afraid it will be hard. To start with, do we want mutable trees, 
upward pointers ?  Do we want to keep locations, namespace declarations, 
comments, entity references ... ?  Which whitespace to remove ?

Anyway, a tree representation can easily be built on top of an 
event-driven interface. The difficult part in parsing XML is really 
lexing. We can try to agree upon one or several standard tree 
representation, but I believe we should start with an event-driven 
interface.

Is someone willing to set-up a mailing list for this discussion ?

-- Alain