API versioning in SAX

Dean Roddey (roddey@us.ibm.com)
Thu, 30 Jul 1998 17:37:25 -0400


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);=

}

It is important to note that with such an approach, there would have
to be a registry of feature names in addition to the SAX interface.

Wouldn't it be better to just allow the current API version to be queri=
ed? The
above scheme would probably encourage a little too much "a la carte' ty=
pe of
feature support, wouldn't it? If you allow stick to being able to query=
what
level of the API the parser supports, that would be a simpler, cleaner =
way to
know whether the underlying parser can do what you need to do.

Just a thought...

----------------------------------------
Dean Roddey
Software Weenie
IBM Center for Java Technology - Silicon Valley
roddey@us.ibm.com
=