I'm done with the can there be an arbitrary-execution-order-SAX aspect
of this thread, but as usual Megginson does stir up some off-shoot
thoughts of interest...

On Fri, 2004-12-31 at 18:44 -0500, Alan Gutierrez wrote:
>     The characters event is interesting, becuase it is an index into
>     the parse buffer (in theory, and on Xerces indeed), but a
>     characters evet is only ever at the top of the stack. I only
>     ever need one.

Interestingly enough, this is precisely one of the aspects of Python/SAX
that is incompatible to Java (as I intimated earlier).  in Python/SAX,
we decided to go with the (in our opinions) much less tangled approach
of making the parameter from characters events an actual text object,
rather than a set of offsets.

I know the original SAX idea was optimization, but I do think this is
exactly one of those areas where perhaps (IMO) premature optimization
ends up limiting design evolution, and I also think that it interferes
with the "Simple" part.

Not a problem in Python/SAX.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
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Use CSS to display XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss-i.html
Full XML Indexes with Gnosis - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/12/08/py-xml.html
Be humble, not imperial (in design) - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10286
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Default and error handling in XSLT lookup tables - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook.html
A survey of XML standards - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand4/
The State of Python-XML in 2004 - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/10/13/py-xml.html