SAX and delayed entity loading

Gabe Beged-Dov (begeddov@jfinity.com)
Sat, 28 Nov 1998 10:28:53 -0800

I have been performing thought experiments (in other words, I haven't
actually tried it out :-) on how to delay loading of external entities using
SAX. The scenario is you want to do browser style incremental presentation
where you delegate any external entity loading to separate SAX pipelines.
You want to spew the overrall structure into the users' face as quickly as
possible and then fill in the blanks.

My impression of the SAX architecture is that the parser is expecting to
handle all loading of external entities itself. It will call the
EntityResolver expecting to get either a system identifier or a stream.
There doesn't seem to be a third possibility of "ignore this entity".

It seems you can fake this by returning a dummy stream to the parser from
your resolver. This dummy stream would have minimal well formed content
(could it be empty?) and then on you go. Are there other possibilities?

Gabe Beged-Dov
www.jfinity.com