XML parser patterns

[Magnus Heino]

Hi.

Are there any patterns or other design techniques that could be used when implementing a xml parser that needs to be able to handle different versions of a schema?

Let's say that I write a xml parser that can parse xhtml 1.0. Now I want it to be able to handle both xhtml 1.0 and xhtml 1.1. How should I design my application?

Thanks,

/Magnus

 

[Martin Honnen]

Are there any patterns or other design techniques that could be used when implementing a xml parser that needs to be able to handle different versions of a schema?

Let's say that I write a xml parser that can parse xhtml 1.0. Now I want it to be able to handle both xhtml 1.0 and xhtml 1.1. How should I design my application?

A nonvalidating parser only needs to check for well-formedness and should therefore be able to parse any XML language, whether that is XTHML 1.0 or XHTML 1.1 or SVG. Even a validating parser should be able to validate against any DTD and/or XML schema and not just parse against the DTD for for instance XHTML 1.0 strict. That is the whole reason to have a meta language XML as an extensible markup language so that parsers can be written for XML in general and not one for each XML language/application someone comes up with. I am not a parser developer however and we do not have many questions on such topics here, maybe the list http://xml.org/xml/xmldev.shtml is a better place to get answers from developers and implementers

 

[Richard Tobin]

Let's say that I write a xml parser that can parse xhtml 1.0.

That's not how it's usually done.

You write a parser that can parse *any* well-formed XML, and then you write a validation layer on top of it that checks that the elements and attributes conform to the DTD or schema.

-- Richard