The Minimal Parser provides Microsoft® eMbedded Visual C++® interfaces using SAX2, but offers no Document Object Model (DOM) processing. DOM processing reads an entire XML file, breaks it up into individual objects; such as elements, attributes, and comments; and then creates a tree structure of the document in memory. The benefit of using the DOM is that you can reference and manipulate each object, called a node, individually. However, creating a tree structure for a document, especially a large document, requires a significant amount of memory.

Unlike the DOM, SAX2 is events based; it generates events as it finds specific symbols in an XML document. One advantage of SAX2 is that it reads a section of an XML document, generates an event, and then moves on to the next section. Because SAX2 processes documents in this serial fashion, it uses less memory than the DOM and is therefore better than the DOM for processing large documents. SAX2 can create applications that abort processing when a particular piece of information is found.

The XML Minimal Parser supports only the following SAX2 interfaces:

• ISAXAttributes:IUnknown
  
  
• ISAXContentHandler:IUnknown
  
  
• ISAXXMLReader:IUnknown
  
  

XML Minimal Parser does not support document type definition (DTD) validation or element resolution. The Minimal Parser ignores all DTD elements in the XML file. Also, the XML Minimal Parser does not support the MSXML Writer class.

For more information about developing with SAX, see this Microsoft Web site .

See Also