Beginning XML, 4th Edition

Appendix G. SAX 2.0.2 Reference

This appendix contains the specification of the SAX interface, version 2.0.2, some of which is explained in Chapter 12. It is taken largely verbatim from the definitive specification to be found at www.saxproject.org, with editorial comments added in italics. The classes and interfaces are described in alphabetical order and include the primary SAX interfaces and classes and SAX extensions. Deprecated classes and helper classes that are distributed with SAX 2.0.2 are not covered.

The SAX specification is in the public domain. (See the website mentioned previously for a statement of policy on copyright.) Essentially, the policy says do what you like with it, copy it as you wish, but no one accepts any liability for errors or omissions.

SAX 2.0.2 contains complete namespace support, which is available by default from any XMLReader object. An XML reader can also optionally supply raw XML 1.0 names. An XML reader is fully configurable: It is possible to attempt to query or change the current value of any feature or property. Features and properties are identified by fully qualified URIs, and parties are free to invent their own names for new extensions.

The ContentHandler and Attributes interfaces are similar to the deprecated DocumentHandler and AttributeList interfaces, but they add support for namespace-related information. ContentHandler also adds a callback for skipped entities, and the Attributes interface adds the capability to look up an attribute's ...