RE: XML Questions

["Stou Sandalski" <tangui () cell2000 net>]

Ok as far as I know, there are two (standard) APIs for parsing XML documents
DOM and SAX, DOM basicaly takes the whole document and builds a tree from
it, its nice and all but takes a lot of memory and I am pretty sure it needs
the whole document.  SAX on the other hand gives you events, ie start of
document, start of node this end of node that... so on etc... from this I
can conclude that you don't need to have the whole document to be using
it....

http://www.megginson.com/SAX/

has some useful info. However (kinda common sense), all the information tags
xcept statistics should be at the beggining so a program can read them
immediatly.  Besides I think that (I am like 99% sure), that an XML document
must have one root node.  I am thinking if there is a way to add progress
indication... but I can't think of anything hehehe.

So I guess you should just leave the structure the way it is, and people
should just chose a SAX or DOM based parser to use in their app., or some
type of custom home grown dealie (which I really seee no reason for).  If
you think about it, a web-based view of an nmap scan will need the whole
file so as to add footers and nice formating and such (use transforms on it)
and so a DOM parser would be the thing to use.  Where an application like a
client for X needs the info as its coming.

Last thought, what kind of debug output (like sent this syn packet, got that
packet, etc.) does nmap support and is there any use for making XML tags for
that output?


Stou


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Fyodor [mailto:fyodor () insecure org]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2000 22:20
> To: nmap-dev () insecure org
> Subject: XML Questions
>
>
>
> Regarding the sample output I sent ...
>
> Will most XML tools allow "streaming" input (eg they can process each
> <host> ... </host> entity as they come even though everything is in an
> <nmaprun> ... </nmaprun> top level tag.  Or should I avoid top level tags
> to ensure that programs can parse Nmap output "on the fly" using commonly
> available XML libraries/tools?
>
> Obviously Nmap can take an extended perios to run and tools should be able
> to process each host as it is scanned.
>
> Cheers,
> -F


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