Re: SAX: parser features (was SAX: two alternatives for namespaces)

Ron Bourret (rbourret@dvs1.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 15:01:47 +0200

> This leads to another thought -- that we probably need some kind of a
> hook for requesting and/or querying parser features. This issue came
> up before during the initial SAX 1.0 design. Something like the
> following might be appropriate:
>
> package org.xml.sax;
>
> public interface Parser {
> ...
> public boolean hasFeature (String featureName);
> public boolean requestFeature (String featureName, boolean status);
> }

We designed this kind of mechanism into ODBC. Because of the large number of
optional features, it is quite difficult to write truly generic ODBC code. I
believe this was justified in ODBC's case because we wanted to work with a large
variety of existing databases that had a tremendous range of capabilities.

I don't think the same situation applies to SAX. SAX is still fairly young and
we have a better chance to dictate/agree on required features, so we should
avoid optional features as long as possible. (WRT namespaces, we should either
design around them or simply require parsers to support them.)

-- Ron Bourret