Essential XML: Beyond Markup

Where Are We?

The Infoset is a nice idea, but it is barely useful if software cannot be written against it. Fortunately, there are two widely accepted programmatic interfaces based on the Infoset that allow documents to be manipulated and [de]serialized at the Infoset level, not at the character-stream/markup level. The Simple API for XML (SAX) is a streaming interface that models a document information item as a stream of well-known method invocations. The Document Object Model (DOM) models a document information item as a hierarchical set of nodes that are instances of Infoset-like abstract types. Both styles of interfaces are likely to survive for some time, as they serve completely different purposes.