Re: [xml-dev] SAX for Binary Encodings (preserving investment) (ASN.1 and SAX)

At 11:44 PM +0000 11/8/03, Alaric B Snell wrote:


>And since this "give me the data as abstract values rather than 
>strings I need to manually invoke the appropriate parser on each 
>time" SAX option is just optional, and in the presence of imperfect 
>type information (eg: the input is not actually valid with respect 
>to the schema! It doesn't need to be a validating parser to use the 
>schema...) then it would presumably just call the "characters" 
>callback whenever it came across something it was unsure about. Note 
>that when it encounters a string it knows to be of a schema-type 
>that maps to a string, it would call the value callback with a 
>string value - that's a distinct case.

That only works if there's really a string in the document to pass. 
If that were true, then this proposal would only make SAX uglier and 
fatter. It would not necessarily make the documents themselves less 
interoperable. Unfortuantley that's not where this proposal started 
or where it would stop. Its goal is to put binary typed data directly 
into the documents instead of text. And that's completely 
antithetical to XML's nature.

-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA