On 11/9/05, Graham Bennett <graham-boost@simulcra.org> 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 ?