To quote Master Kip, "SAXual puns are the plush Tux of the XML world, they serve to divert the attention of the newbies long enough for them to be indoctrinated."
And of course, every self-respecting geek being a pun-lover, such an easy target as SAX could not be left untouched for long. We've seen SAXy, Safe SAX, SAX Appeal, SAX Drive, SAX Machines, SAX Symbols... the possibilities are endless (some of those are actual real terminology, not only puns). I don't want to know what will happen if the DOM project gains momentum...
Obviously, I hope we don't need to endoctrinate too much. At least once a week it seems that someone will post a problem to the perl-xml list that can be solved in 20-30 lines of SAX Perl that happens to be so simple that people actually post the full working solution (instead of just directions). Nearly every day someone has a question that could be thus answered but people don't always have the time to write 30 lines of code, which is a pity. Nevertheless, I think it's becoming rather clear that many things can be solved trivially with SAX. The endoctrination probably only needs to go towards the people that have an epidermic reaction to XML (*cough*, did I say that aloud?)... as well as probably a few contracts on the more noisy bs-marketers out there.
Also, new SAX2 modules seem to be coming out almost on a daily basis now. It would seem that Ilya Sterin has now ported XML::SAXDriver::CSV to SAX2, and is in the process of doing the same for XML::SAXDriver::Excel. No more fudging with ever changing data grabbing, munging, and writing [1] APIs, they can all be represented in the same way, using the same tools. Ah, the joys of SAX (ooops).
[1] XML::SAX::Writer is being converted from being just an XML writer to something that provides all the facilities and a consistent API to writing out data (you don't need much, but consistency makes things a lot easier imho, as well as not having to care about encoding issues). An HTML writer is already there, and it would seem that CSV and Excel are to join it fast.
