[XML-SIG] easySAX

[Lars Marius Garshol]

I posted an easySAX proposal here a while ago, in response to various
requests for SAX extensions/changes, mainly from Paul Prescod. I've
used it a little myself in the meantime and have found it to be a
major improvement for direct programming compared to pure SAX.

However, before I do anything more about this it would be nice to know
what the rest of the XML-SIG is thinking. Would anyone be unhappy if
SAX were kept as it is, only updated with minor changes and extended
to follow Java SAX 2.0  AND  easySAX were provided as the easy-to-use
alternative, built on top of SAX?

easySAX would, modulo any suggestions, be as proposed in

<URL: http://www.python.org/pipermail/xml-sig/1999-May/001199.html>

with start_*/end_*/pi_*/ppi_* methods.


* Fred L. Drake
| 
| It might be a good idea to use a call to extract the element stack
| instead of providing direct access to the list object.  This would
| allow different internal structures to be used without changing the
| interface.  This might be interesting in some cases.

I didn't do this out of a worry about speed, but now I think we should
do this. Anyone who is concerned about speed can just take the risk
and access the underlying stack directly anyway. Any other opinions?

Also, do we need to do anything in particular to deal with namespaces
here? Should we reserve a namespace-URI callback argument to slot them
into when SAX 2.0 is in place?

As for packaging, I think this should be a separate package from SAX
itself. Other convenient interfaces on top of SAX are both possible
and desirable, and I certainly don't want to monopolize that space
with easySAX or appear to do so.


If nobody protests I'll go ahead and do this, although I'd feel much
easier about it if people actually voiced support for this. Andrew, do
you think this belongs in the XML package?

--Lars M.