SAX2

Chapter 6. Putting It All Together

The preceding chapters have shown most of what you’ll need to know to use SAX2 effectively, but as individual techniques, in small bits and pieces. In this chapter, we’ll look at more substantial examples, which tie those techniques together. The examples here should help you to understand the kinds of modules you’ll need to put together similar SAX2-based applications. You’ll also see some of the options you have for building larger processing tasks from SAX components.

Rich Site Summary: RSS

One of the first popular XML document standards is hidden in the guts of web site management toolsets. It dates to back when XML wasn’t fully crystallized. Back then, there was a lot of interest in using XML to address a widespread problem: how to tell users about updates to web sites so they didn’t need to read the site several times a day. A “channel” based model was widely accepted, building on the broadcast publishers’ analogy of a web site as a TV channel. Microsoft shipped an XML-like format called Channel Definition Format (CDF), and other update formats were also available, but the solution that caught on was from Netscape. It is called RSS. This originally stood for “RDF Site Summary,”^[24] but it was simplified and renamed the “Rich Site Summary” format before it saw any wide adoption.

RSS 0.91 was the mechanism used to populate one of the earliest customizable web portals, My Netscape. The mechanism is simple: RSS presents a list of recently ...