Should SAX include events for the start and end of the prolog, and/or
for the DOCTYPE declaration?
public void startProlog ();
public void endProlog ();
public void docType (String name, String systemID);
CON
---- these methods would make SAX slightly larger;
- these are pretty far out of scope -- the start and end of the prolog can easily be inferred, and a new DOCTYPE can be constructed if needed.
PRO
---- the DOM has a Doctype class;
- it would be nice to have a container of some sort around any PI's and entity start/ends found in the prolog, if we decide to include this information
- it can be useful to know what external DTD the document is using, possibly so that the DTD's URI can be passed off to a different process.
MY RECOMMENDATION -----------------
No.
While this information would be marginally useful, it is really designed for transformation applications, and SAX does not give enough information for really useful transformations otherwise (James has pointed out, for example, the lack of information about internal entity boundaries).
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS --------------------
If some implementations provide additional DTD-related functionality, it would be nice to know when the prolog is finished and the DTD (if present) is fully constructed.
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)