XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Processing approach decisions

Many parsers supply at least two basic methods for accessing XML documents, and the application developer must then choose from the available choices. Some of the key decision factors are discussed below.

Pull method

Programming languages that do not support a call-back technique to get software libraries to pass events back to the main application cannot make use of the SAX standard. If the DOM approach is ruled out, for reasons given below, the only remaining practical option is to adopt a parser that provides a pull-based alternative. In this scenario, the application simply calls methods/functions in the XML processor to retrieve the next piece of the document.

Unfortunately, there are no standards for this approach ...