On Tuesday 17 April 2007 22:37, Jason Orendorff wrote:
The right way to implement these quirks is using new-style classes and properties. Right now minidom uses old-style classes and lots of hackery, and it's pretty broken. (Another example--there is an Attr._set_prefix method, but it is *not* called from __setattr__.)
Yes, it's truly vile. Better than it used to be, but.... There's also some vague attempt at supporting the Python CORBA IDL mapping, since the W3C DOM specifications use that. I expect the support is incomplete at best.
Surely nobody is subclassing these classes. You don't subclass DOM interfaces--the DOM doesn't work that way. So this change should be OK. Right?
There are people who've tried building new DOM implementations by subclassing the minidom classes to get most of the behavior. I'm don't know the status of any of these implementations, but changes to these classes have proved difficult due to this and the possibility of breaking pickles (amazed me, that one did!). I'd love to see a sane implementation, using new-style classes and properties, but as long as we've got to support existing applications, we're pretty well hosed as far as xml.dom.minidom is concerned. A new DOM implementation conforming to the W3C recommendations would be nice, but I'd really rather see an XML object model that doesn't suck, but that supports as much of the information found in the W3C DOM as possible. Something based more on the ElementTree API, perhaps. The value of the W3C-approved API has certainly turned out to be more decoy than anything. -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org>