On Tue, 2006-01-17 at 09:34 -0800, Peter K.Lee wrote: > David Lichteblau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > * What does the "char-sets" column mean? It says "UTF-8 w/o Unicode" for > > cxml; I can't make sense of that. > > Me neither. :) But that is how it is reported in the cxml page. > Other parsers make cursory notes about character sets it supports as > well. I'd be happy to update the column to make it more sane if > someone can shed some light on what it really means...
Well, the neccessary information pretty much would be: does it support the _required_ external encodings (required by the xml standard). AFAIK, most don't. So maybe more important for now (since the above could be captured by 'conforms to standard') would be: which external formats does the library support and how? (i.e.: honor the encoding attribute of the xml declaration (or, even better, honor BOM) or just assume the encoding of the stream). > > * I find the term "DOM" confusing as it is being used here. I know > > that CL-XML documentation uses it to refer to "a document object model", > > not "the (W3C) Document Object Model", but at least it explains that > > clearly. Note that CXML is the only implementation to actually > > support W3C DOM. > > I agree, I made an initial assumption that when the library talked > about DOM, that they were in essence talking about W3C DOM. But it > appears that may not be the case. I'll try to add what kind of DOM > they're talking about with possibly footnotes to each type to describe > it further down the article. > Yes, but that only makes sense for parsers that parse into DOM. Most Lisp parsers parse to SXML. Another parser target that's getting popular these days is the xml-reader API. > > * Somehow I'd like a column "Makes an effort to conform to the > > standards". AFAIK only CL-XML and CXML qualify for a "yes" there. > > I'm not exactly sure how to quantify "making an effort to conform to > the standards". How about: "tries hard to actually implement the standard"? Most Lisp parsers (with the exception of the ones David already mentioned) seem to care little .... > It appears that XML syntax is a particular standard > that all the XML parsing libraries conform to, No! Most parsers in your consumer report parse something xmlish, quasi 'XML light'. Unitl recently only cl-xml implemented namespaces. Similar for CDATA. > and the rest of the > "techniques" of parsing vary widely. If the XML parser does not do > validation, or provide the W3C DOM API, does that mean it is not > making an effort to conform to the standards? No. DOM is an API. Actually, more relevant to XML would be the XML infoset (similar but not identical to DOM). A standard conformant parser _must_ be able to parse all _well-formed_ xml. A validating parser must be able to parse all _valid and well-formed_ xml. Even more important: they should reject non well-formed/non-valid XML. There's a huge test suit to test just this. From cl-xml: (...) The processor passes 1749 of the 1812 tests in the OASIS conformance suite. The cxml library provides a test suit to run against the W3C test cases. > > * Perhaps the XML column could more clearly be named "implementation type" > > or something like that? > > How about "parsing techniques"? How about "parser targets" ? Parsing technique would be something like "LARL" or "Recursive desc." etc. HTH & cheers, Ralf Mattes > > Just my biased 2c, > > And much appreciated! Thanks for your feedback! > > -Peter > _______________________________________________ > Gardeners mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
