Editing Simple API for XML (section)

{{Short description|Parsing algorithm for XML documents}}
{{Refimprove|date=August 2008}}

'''SAX''' ('''Simple API for XML''') is an [[Event-driven programming|event-driven]] <!-- [[sequential access]]--> [[online algorithm]] for [[lexical analysis|lexing]] and [[parsing]] [[XML]] documents, with an [[Application programming interface|API]] developed by the XML-DEV mailing list.<ref name="event-based">{{cite web| access-date = 2011-05-02
| website = webopedia.com
| publisher = WEBOPEDIA
| title = SAX
| date = 14 August 2003
| quote = Short for Simple API for XML, an event-based API that, as an alternative to DOM, allows someone to access the contents of an XML document. SAX was originally a Java-only API. The current version supports several programming language environments other than Java. SAX was developed by the members of the XML-DEV mailing list.
| url = http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/SAX.html}}</ref> SAX provides a mechanism for reading data from an XML document that is an alternative to that provided by the [[Document Object Model]] (DOM). Where the DOM operates on the document as a whole—building the full [[abstract syntax tree]] of an XML document for convenience of the user—SAX parsers operate on each piece of the XML document sequentially, issuing parsing events while making a [[One-pass compiler|single pass]] through the input stream.