Processing XML with Java™: A Guide to SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, and TrAX

SAX

SAX, the Simple API for XML, was the first standard API shared across different XML parsers. SAX is unique among XML APIs in that it models the parser rather than the document. In particular the parser is represented as an instance of the XMLReader interface. The specific class that implements this interface varies from parser to parser. Most of the time, you access it only through the common methods of the XMLReader interface.

A parser reads a document from beginning to end. As it does so, it encounters start-tags, end-tags, text, comments, processing instructions, and more. In SAX, the parser tells the client application what it sees as it sees it by invoking methods in a ContentHandler object. ContentHandler is an interface the client ...