[XML-SIG] Re: While we're on the subject of xmlproc, DTDs and validation ...

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Jim Fulton
| 
| In Most cases, I'd expect to amortize DTD parsing over many
| documents, either by preprocessing standard DTDs or catching DTDs.

I've looked at this and found it to not be entirely straightforward
due to the problems introduced by the internal subset. Also, early
tests showed that the speedup from using pickle to load DTD objects
was just by a factor of 4 (if I remember correctly) over normal DTD
parsing.
  
Anyway, if you disallow the internal subset I have most of the code
necessary to do this written although no integrated yet.

| [using dtdparser.py]
| 
| I suspected this, but I had trouble figuring out the interface.

Feel free to ask if you find the documentation hard to understand.
That will help me improve it (once I have the time to do so, at
least).

| [reliability of xmldtd.py structure] 
| 
| I'll write something that takes as input the data structures created
| internally whan xmlproc parses a document.  If you change those data
| structures, my software will break. :)

The intention is that all documented APIs in xmlproc should remain
unchanged as far as possible (although they can be extended and also
change semantics in backward-compatible ways), and although there are
many things I would like to clean up I refrain from doing so.
  
So, yes, you should be able to rely on them.

--Lars M.