A Compiler-Based Approach to Schema-Specific XML Parsing

The validation of XML instances against a schema is usually performed separately from the parsing of the more basic syntactic aspects of XML. We posit, however, that schema information can be used during parsing to improve performance, using what we call schema-specific parsing. This paper develops a framework for schema-specific parsing centered on an intermediate representation we call generalized automata, which abstracts the computational steps necessary to validate against a schema. The generalized automata can then be used to generate optimized code which might be onerous to write manually. We present results that suggest this is a viable approach to high-performance XML parsing.