Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML

Item 31. Program to Standard APIs

Parsers, DOM implementations, XSLT engines, and other XML-related tools vary widely in speed, efficiency, specification conformance, and bugginess. Sometimes these are innate characteristics of the code and the skill of the programmers who wrote it. Other times the relative quality depends on the environment. For instance, early versions of the Xerces XML parser for Java, written by IBM, tended to perform very well on IBM's Java virtual machine and very poorly on Sun's Java virtual machine, while the Crimson parser written by the Sun team had almost precisely opposite performance characteristics. Still other times the relative performance of tools depends on the documents they process. For instance, some DOM ...