>Is it possible for any factory to be flexible (and extensible) >enough to allow what you're talking about? Perhaps if you asked >the factory for a parser that supports a list of features and it >would only return a parser that supported those features.
There was discussion of taking exactly that approach in the proposed find-an-implementation call for the DOM's Java bindings -- tell it what you need and have it return one that matches, or ask it to enumerate avilable implementations so you can query each one for its ability to support a particular set of features. This does require that the feature names be reasonably well standardized -- or maybe not; if you ask for something nonstandard, presumably the fact that only the implementation which defined it is acceptable wouldn't be a problem. >And what if the parser can't provide the parser features required? >Is the app dead in the water? If the app needs a feature the parser can't support, it's probably dead anyway... but this is an argument for enumerating and letting the users select, so they can define their own criterial for acceptable/best match. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
