Is DOM vs SAX a red herring?

[Karl Auerbach <karl@cavebear.com>]

I'm reading the discussion on XML attributes versus elements.  And much of 
the argument seems to be on the relative memory and processing performance 
of SAX versus DOM methods of decoding XML.

(by-the-way, I'm leaning towards the "few attributes/more elements" side
of the discussion.)

From my experience with doing SNMP set operations, the major job of the
agent is to gather all the pieces of the proposed configuration change
together and do a consistency analysis.  That kind of testing can easily
be the largest part of the agent in a managed device.

If one is doing that kind of evaluation of the proposed configuration data
- and I suggest that any device that doesn't do it is taking quite a risk
- then there will be a time when most of the proposed configuration data
is going to have to be simultaneously resident in memory.

It seems to me, therefore, that I am going to be paying the memory price
of a DOM-like data tree even if I use SAX.

		--karl--
 


--
to unsubscribe send a message to xmlconf-request@ops.ietf.org with
the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
archive: <http://ops.ietf.org/lists/xmlconf/>