Re: NEED BY TUESDAY: status of Altifier

Thanks for the suggestion.  Well I wrote my own parser partly because I 
was originally doing this in my bedroom in a little village in the 
depths of West Dorset, with little knowledge of what the W3C was or 
what it did.  But I had to make lots of changes to my parser to make 
sure it can cope with the various cases of non-standardness that are out 
there, and I have a feeling that the sample code stuff is probably 
rather more picky about its standards than I am.  This probably limits 
its use somewhat.  Two passes, by the way, are needed for doing things 
like checking what character encoding the document is in (and bearing in 
mind that headers can lie), and whether it's using old or new style 
comments, and so on.

Well I've incorporated a kind-of extension model of my own that can 
probably just about be used to bolt things together as long as they're 
dependent on tags only.  Once I have parsed a tag, it goes into an 
object with a few useful methods, and I use those methods to manipulate 
it in the gateway.  If you can get extra code to use the same object, 
you can incorporate it with a couple of #define lines in platform.h, 
link it in, and it will appear under the Extensions button (this is what 
you call being messy with the preprocessor but it's supposed to make 
sure the extensions aren't coupled too tightly).  Since Michael is 
essentially parsing a file and passing various tags to his database, I 
thought I could probably skip his parser and pass the tags myself, if I 
could figure out exactly what his database wants (slightly awkward as 
the code might be buggy) and hack out an interface between my tag 
objects and his.  OK an extra interface is a slight inefficency, but not 
half as inefficent as re-reading the file a couple more times and on the 
other hand I don't want the coupling to be too tight.

Regards

-- Silas S Brown, St John's College Cambridge UK http://epona.ucam.org/~ssb22/

"Better is it that you vow not than that you vow and do not pay"
 - Ecclesiastes 5:5

Received on Tuesday, 16 March 1999 12:29:23 UTC