[issue11379] Remove "lightweight" from minidom description

[Stefan Behnel]

New submission from Stefan Behnel <scoder at users.sourceforge.net>:

http://docs.python.org/library/xml.dom.minidom.html

presents MiniDOM as a "Lightweight DOM implementation". The word "lightweight" is easily misunderstood as meaning "efficient" or "memory friendly". MiniDOM is well known to be neither of the two.

The first paragraph then continues:

"""
xml.dom.minidom is a light-weight implementation of the Document Object Model interface. It is intended to be simpler than the full DOM and also significantly smaller.
"""

Again, "smaller" can be misread as "low memory footprint", whereas it is actually supposed to refer to an incomplete DOM API implementation. And "simpler" is also clearly exaggerated when compared to the alternative ElementTree package.

I would like to see this changed and combined with a clear and visible comment that MiniDOM has very high resource profile, e.g.

"""
19.7. xml.dom.minidom — Pure Python DOM implementation

xml.dom.minidom is a pure Python implementation of the Document Object Model interface, as known from other programming languages. It is intended to provide a smaller API than the full DOM.

Note, however, that MiniDOM has a very large memory footprint compared to other Python XML libraries. If you need a fast and memory friendly XML tree implementation with a vastly simpler API, use the xml.etree package instead.
"""

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 129914
nosy: docs at python, scoder
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Remove "lightweight" from minidom description
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.2, Python 3.3

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue11379>
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