Should SAX include an event for comments?
public void comment (char ch[], int length);
CON
---- comments are purely lexical, and do not form an integral part of a document's information set for processing (as opposed to authoring or archiving);
- including comments in SAX might encourage comment abuses like those common in HTML (i.e. enclosing 800 lines of JavaScript in a comment).
PRO
---- the DOM includes comments in the core level-one implementation;
- HyTime uses comments for lexical constraints.
MY RECOMMENDATION -----------------
No.
SAX is not designed for authoring tools or repositories, that need to preserve the lexical as well as the logical structure of a document, and there is no compelling reason to report comments here except for DOM building (and we can always leave them out of a DOM).
The conventional comments in HyTime are not required, and personally, I believe that they should not have been there in the first place.
FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS ----------------------
Another lexical feature that I am not discussing here is CDATA sections; I assume that, when the parser is reporting character data, it does not matter how the parser obtained those characters (in a CDATA section, or in regular #PCDATA with the delimiters escaped using references). I am happy, of course, to listen to other opinions on this subject.
All the best,
David
-- David Megginson ak117@freenet.carleton.ca Microstar Software Ltd. dmeggins@microstar.com http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)