This is the core package for SAX (Simple API for XML) parsing of XML documents. SAX is an "event-driven" API: a SAX parser reads an XML document and generates a stream of "SAX events" to describe the content of the document. These "events" are actually method calls made on one or more handler objects that the application has registered with the parser. The XMLReader interface defines the API that must be implemented by a SAX parser. ContentHandler, ErrorHandler, EntityResolver, and DTDHandler are interfaces that define handler objects. An application registers objects that implement one or more of these interfaces with the XMLReader.

This package defines both the SAX1 and SAX2 interfaces. The AttributesList, DocumentHandler and Parser interfaces, as well as the HandlerBase class are part of the SAX1 API and are now deprecated in favor of Attributes, ContentHandler, XMLReader, and org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler.