[X3D-Public] containerField is should or must ? large attributes; compression

[Braden McDaniel]

On Mon, 2010-08-09 at 15:37 -0700, Joe D Williams wrote: 
> > mix poorly with conventional XML parser design
> 
> I think we found problems with old html parser design that defaulted 
> different treatments between attributes and element content. 
> Specifically,m the attribute value was saved diertly to memory while 
> the element content was passed on into a file.

No, there's nothing to do with "old html parser design" here.

All XML parsing APIs I'm aware of pass the attribute value to client
code in a single call.  Usually this also means the attribute value is
passed in a single contiguously allocated buffer.  (Those two aspects
both play into poor performance with exceptionally large attribute
values; though at least theoretically they're distinct issues.)

> There is no XML 
> requirement for max length of either attribute value or element 
> content length that I have seen. At that time, element content could 
> not be an arbitrary type. Given that attributes are meant to be final 
> data,there is no problem with the way we did it originally.

So?  Even "final data" has to be parsed.  Are you suggesting that the
design was informed by an XML parsing API that streams attribute values
incrementally?  (Which one is this?)

-- 
Braden McDaniel <braden at endoframe.com>