[XML-SIG] SAX2 in python20b1 usable?

Martin v. Loewis martin@loewis.home.cs.tu-berlin.de
Wed, 13 Sep 2000 20:53:34 +0200


> Were we premature to include the XML package in the standard library?
> I have not used either that code or the XML package, so I'm not
> qualified to judge.  But I have heard a lot of complaints about the
> xml package and few people have said they are happy that it is there.

I haven't used this much. However, I feel all is fine if the interface
is right - the implementation itself may be terrible, but that can be
fixed in future versions.

As for the interface, the xml package of Python 2 has:

- a SAX library (SAX2, right?)
- a DOM library
- functions to create SAX and DOM parsers

The SAX and DOM APIs themselves are agreed-upon in the XML community,
so there is nothing dangerous in providing them.

Creation of parsers is the weak point right now - especially as the
PyXML package does not provide the same interfaces. I think that must
be fixed by updating PyXML to provide the same interface.

The Python XML code suffers from great instability of the interface
over the years. IMO, this partially caused by authors of that code
having no concern about backwards compatibility. I hope committing to
an API, as will be done for Python 2, will provide greater stability.
I believe the API is not inherently bad. 

  > Is the code in python2-cvs thought to be usable

  LMG> No, not really.

Lars, can you please elaborate? What is it that does not work? Or,
what essential features are missing?

Regards,
Martin