7.22.3.1 History

Back in the 1990s, when the world was young again and XML was the solution to all of its problems, there were basically two kinds of XML parsers out there: DOM parsers and SAX parsers.

A DOM parser reads through an entire XML document, building up a tree of “DOM objects” representing the document structure. They are very easy to use, but sometimes you don’t actually want all of the information in a document; building an object tree is not necessary if all you want to do is to count word frequencies in a document, for example.

SAX parsers were created to give the programmer more control on the parsing process. A programmer gives the SAX parser a number of “callbacks”: functions that will be called on various features of the XML stream as they are encountered. SAX parsers are more efficient, but much harder to user, as users typically have to manually maintain a stack of open elements.

Kiselyov realized that the SAX programming model could be made much simpler if the callbacks were formulated not as a linear fold across the features of the XML stream, but as a tree fold over the structure implicit in the XML. In this way, the user has a very convenient, functional-style interface that can still generate optimal parsers.

The xml->sxml interface from the (sxml simple) module is a DOM-style parser built using SSAX, though it returns SXML instead of DOM objects.

This document was generated on April 20, 2013 using texi2html 5.0.