On 02:55 pm, exarkun@divmod.com wrote:
On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:51:10 -0400, Phil Christensen <phil@bubblehouse.org> wrote:
If it's so bad that you'd tell someone not to use it, why isn't it deprecated?
Because it would take a lot of work to deprecate, and there are a lot of other things people are working on that are deemed more important.
Also because there isn't a complete consensus on how terrible it is. If you are doing advanced XML processing, it definitely isn't the best choice, because it's missing a bunch of features and it has some idiosyncratic behavior. However, it is conveniently available without adding another dependency and it supports simple use-cases OK; this is still a problem with other XML libraries in Python, especially DOM libraries. (For example, incompatibilities between the various lxml implementations.) I, personally, don't think it should be deprecated, even if it shouldn't be particularly strongly recommended, either.