[XML-SIG] consolidation?

[Lars Marius Garshol]

* Martin v. Loewis
|
| If you don't want to learn xmlproc, then just don't. I just
| completed writing a book on Python that also talks about XML, and I
| did not mention the xmlproc API with a single line of text - I claim
| there only is SAX and DOM in Python.

* Frank J. S. Chen
| 
| That's the point too. I am planning to write a Chinese book to
| intruduce XML processing with Python, but xmlproc is a very
| important parser in PyXML package, and cannot leave it just
| alone. But if I describe the original xmlproc API, readers will get
| confused because its not being consistent with SAX 2.0. So I have
| such an opinion in xmlproc.  The only way to do is omit the xmlproc
| specific APIs and focus on drivers layers, just like you did.

As it happens, I am also writing a book about XML processing with
Python, and I have to confess that I don't understand these concerns
at all. My book divides the developer's options into event-based,
tree-based, declarative and miscellaneous.

In the event-based category, I describe the options as being a choice
between SAX and the native APIs of the various parsers. This is the
situation in Python, just as it is in Java, and I believe that this is
by far the best way to do it, since it doesn't leave the reader
confused as to what parsers and SAX really are and what the
relationship between them is.

So I cover SAX, but I also describe the xmllib, pyexpat, xmlproc and
even XP (JPython) APIs, and so far not one of my reviewers has
complained that this is in any way confusing.

--Lars M.