It is so tempting to tell this guy "you made the bed, now f'ing sleep in it!" Why can't you use a simple line-oriented flat-file model on XML? Because they designed it to work differently, and he was in on the design!

However, he doesn't make much of a case for the problem with using SAX. What's the real difference between using callbacks and writing a while (<STDIN>) loop? Not that much, in my opinion.