Stefan Seefeld wrote:
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 !).
That's not true. SAX was extended to support namespaces above 5 years ago - see http://www.saxproject.org/ for the Java interface, or my Arabica library for a C++ version http://www.jezuk.co.uk/cgi-bin/view/arabica
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.
For some definition of better. The unpleasantness with pull APIs is the token - you have to interrogate it for its actual type, and then dispatch. In certain circumstances this obviously applies to the DOM too. In other cases, and I accept that I might be unusual in this, SAX is the right thing to use. Jez