Scott Sauyet wrote: > I do understand the differences in strengths of DOM and SAX. I'm > still trying to imagine a case in which I would want to do both for > the same document. Can you suggest such a case?
And I shoudl have said that I was looking for a case in which I would want to use both SAX and DOM techniques on the same document in the same program. Obviously, different programs might need to do very different things with the document, and might choose different techniques. I'm curious because some years ago, I was working with a mostly-COBOL team that needed to work with XML. The skeptics thought that XML was going to be terribly bloated compared to their VSAM files (it actually turned out to be significantly smaller), and they were looking for any reason to reject using XML at all. They almost got their wish when they used the IBM COBOL XML parser that came with that mainframe OS. This parser was simply too slow to meet their requirements, and this was a big blow against XML. I did some investigating and realized that this parser combined the worst features of SAX and DOM: it supplied only a sequence of events instead of random access, but had to load the whole document into memory to do so! I was able to write a SAX-like parser in a few days and we did end up using XML. But it made me very wary of ever combining SAX- and DOM-style interfaces in a single program. I have never seen any application which would be improved by doing both. -- Scott -- To view archived discussions from the original JSMentors Mailman list: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To search via a non-Google archive, visit here: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
