[stdlib-sig] html package idea

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Wed Feb 20 21:20:16 CET 2008


On Feb 20, 2008 9:40 AM, Fred Drake <fdrake at acm.org> wrote:
> On Feb 20, 2008, at 5:59 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> > -1. SGML is a much more general markup language than HTML.
>
> Certainly.  sgmllib doesn't handle the general case, and is unlikely
> to be reasonably extensible to support a substantial subset of SGML.
>

This is why I suggested moving it. Since the docs for sgmllib
explicitly state it does not provide full support for SGML as-is I
figured it should just get shifted. Heck, it might be a prime
candidate for API removal since it is not a complete implementation.

> > It's true that only htmllib does use sgmllib in the std lib,
> > but there are applications out there that rely on sgmllib
> > for the SGML part, e.g. ones implementing the DocBook tool
> > chain.
>
> I'd strongly encourage anyone who wants to use Python for general SGML
> parsing to either fork sgmllib (with a new name) and give it a real
> go, or integrate an existing SGML parser.  Pretending that sgmllib is
> really a usable SGML parser doesn't seem like a good idea.  It's also
> not widely enough used that it makes sense to have such a beast in the
> standard library.

I am definitely adding sgmllib to the list of possible module to
remove, but that is a separate email for another day. =)

-Brett


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