[jdom-interest] DOMOutputter and other thoughts

[Jason Hunter]

> At the risk of sounding dull witted, I still see a conflict with this
> statement.  I really do remember earlier messages talking about a JDOM
> specific parser.  The reason for the parser would be to allow deferred
> parsing of parts of the document, a lighter footprint, no dependence on
> Xerces or other parsers etc..  

Right, first off we get what looks to be a faster parser with a smaller
memory footprint and no need for xerces.jar in the distribution.  Then
we'll have a good codebase (and resident parser guru) who can help build
the deferred parser.

> require a DOM Document, the conflict I see is that in order to use JDOM with
> DOM consuming tools, you reintroduce the need for an external parser
> package.  

Yes, if you want to interact with a DOM consuming tool, you'll need a
DOM implementation.  One option is to say "download xerces.jar if you
need this" or we could theoretically take the classes from Xerces that
implement DOM and bundle them as (for example) xerces-light.jar.  My
guess is that much of xerces.jar is dedicated to parsing, which we
wouldn't need.  Our adapter model is flexible enough to allow lots of
options for this sort of thing.

-jh-