Standard interface for DOM building

Michael Kay (M.H.Kay@eng.icl.co.uk)
Fri, 25 Sep 1998 13:58:39 +0100


There are a number of DOM implementations now appearing,
(for example a new one from SUN) and I have been trying to
add support for them to SAXON. The thing that's missing is a
standard interface to build the Document. Can XML-DEV step
in to fill the gap?

I'm using the following interface, as a starter for ten
(sorry, that's a UK game show phrase):

public interface DOMBuilder
{

/**
* Define the parser to be used when building the DOM.
The DOM implementation is free to ignore this and use its
* own parser if it wishes.
*/

public void setParser (Parser parser);

/**
* Build the DOM document from an input source.
* @param source The InputSource to use.
* @return The DOM Document object that results from
parsing the input.
*/

public Document build (InputSource source)
throws java.io.IOException,
org.xml.sax.SAXException;

}

I've got implementations of this interface working for the
Docuverse and SUN products; anyone see any difficulty in
supporting it for other DOM implementations? Are there any
other methods that could/should go in the interface?

Any ideas where this should belong: part of SAX 2.0?

Mike Kay