One can define higher level API specifications on top of SAX. By the very nature of SAX, these will be specifications for streaming XML processing.
One such specification is the XML Path Event API (XPEA). It provides for events triggered by XPath-style pattern matching (or XPattern). This means that event handlers will be called when certain patterns (like for instance "root/child/*/descendant") in the XML document are matched, as opposed to SAX where the same content handler is called for each and every element (unless it is dynamically replaced).