Announce: Pyxie - an Open Source XML Processing Library for Python

Matt Gushee mgushee at havenrock.com
Sat Dec 18 03:16:06 EST 1999


Andrew Cooke <andrew at andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk> writes:

> > Pyxie is an Open Source XML Processing Library for Python
> > that lives at http://www.pyxie.org.

> This isn't criticism, just a request for information - why go through an
> intermediate representation rather than use XML directly?  What does Pyx
> have/not have that XML doesn't/does?  I don't know much about XML, so
> this may be a very silly question!

I can't speak for Sean McGrath, but IMHO:

It's not a silly question. The first thing you need to know about XML
is that it's not a programming language. It's a data/document
description language. So, by definition, it doesn't and will never
*do* anything. You need to use a programming language to manipulate
it.

Every program that works with XML needs, at a minimum, to have it
parsed. Then there are certain higher-level models (e.g. the 'tree' -- 
a hierarchical structure of data nodes) that are usually or very
commonly used.

There is no sense in every programmer who wants to work with XML
writing their own parsing routines, etc. Pyxie provides some of these
infrastructural functions, to make it easier for you & me to start
creating cool applications that work with XML.

Hope this helps a bit.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Portland, Maine, USA
mgushee at havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/



More information about the Python-list mailing list