bug#11916: 24.1.50; Making url-dav work

[Stefan Monnier]

> Just do an M-x occur on "'DAV:"; pretty much every test you see against
> some symbol 'DAV:foo (about 30) has to be changed to test against
> '("DAV" . "foo") instead. This also implies that every 'eq' has to be
> changed to 'equal', 'assq' to 'assoc', 'plist-get' to 'lax-plist-get',
> and so on. I started doing that and it just felt wrong; the code gets
> larger, less readable and possibly slower without any real
> benefit. However, I don't feel terribly strong about this, so if this
> in-place XML change is considered too hack-ish, I can still finish that
> rewrite.

What would happen if url-dav.el didn't use namespaces (and just removed
"DAV:" from all those symbols)?

> I think namespace-aware parsing was added in 2004 or so, so changing it
> now would surely break some code out there. Also, I could imagine that
> under other circumstances you can profit from such a representation; but
> url-dav simply wants to make sure that everything is in the 'DAV'
> namespace.

Of course, I was thinking of changing it in a backward compatible way,
by letting the `parse-ns' argument specify which kind of result
you want.
The changes should be mostly limited to xml-maybe-do-ns.


        Stefan