Re: [topicmaps-comment] TMs & XTM [Was: skills to create topic maps]

[Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@garshol.priv.no>]

* Robert Barta
| 
| What I find pretty useful is to build SAX drivers as described in
| 
|   http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/09/19/sax-non-xml-data.html
| 
| That way you do not have to write an adapter for every different
| format (XTM, LTM, AsTMa=, ...) but only a driver. The process
| building the internal database is common to all via the chain of SAX
| events.

Actually, if you have a good API it's probably easier to use that than
to generate SAX events. My Java LTM parser is written using antlr, and
is only 237 lines, most of which are the antlr grammar. The actual
topic map building is really so simple that generating XML is harder. 

That's not to say that SAX drivers for various non-XML formats are not
useful, but in this case I'm not sure it's such a good fit, simply
because it's easier to do it the "hard" way.

--Lars M.