On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 15:21 -0600, Richard Salz wrote: > > In retrospect I > > think it was a mistake to even bless SAX and DOM by putting them in the > > stdlib. > > On the one hand I agree with this -- why should these pigs be better than > any other animals on the farm -- but on the other hand, as someone who > wants to build higher-level facilities on top of XML, it's a real pain. > "The nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from" > was a complaint, not praise, and string.replace('standards', 'doms') does > not make it any better.
Well WXS was supposed to be the one schema standard to choose from, right? ;-) I also wonder how many people will accept XQuery as the default way to access collections of XML. But taking tongue out of cheek, I think my problem with your point lies in "string.replace('standards', 'doms')". I'm quite fine with the idea of minidom as the Python standard DOM (even though I prefer our own Domlette). But this is not a matter of blessing one of many DOMs, it's a matter of blessing one of many processing idioms entirely. DOM is but one class. Here is a categorization I've used: A. Python DOMs: minidom, Domlete, pxdom, etc. B. Python Infosets: ElementTree, pyRXPu, etc. C. XML-schema-driven data bindings: GenerateDS, etc. D. Python-schema-driven data bindings: XIST, Guido's module (I think), etc. E. Non-schema-driven data bindings: Amara bindery, xmltramp, Gnosis, etc. F. Call-back stream APIs: SAX, PyExpat, etc. G. Iterator stream APIs: ElementTree iterparse, Amara pushbind, pulldom, etc. Python's stdlib currently blesses one from A, two from F and one from G. Guido's proposal would add one from D. I suppose one could argue that it's OK to have one from each category, but I say that would just confuse the heck out of users. One could argue that even having 5 entries would confuse the heck out of users. Or is that no worse confusion than having two dozen viable third-party options? I don't know. I do know one thing: I can think of situations where I would prefer each of A through G. Some idioms really are better than others for some tasks. XML is incredibly diverse, and I think it's very hard to pick one-size-fits-all solutions. That's the main concern that gives me pause. -- Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc. http://uche.ogbuji.net http://fourthought.com http://copia.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org Articles: http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/publications/ _______________________________________________ XML-SIG maillist - XML-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/xml-sig