Re: Linking Emacs with libxml2

[Lennart Borgman]

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 5:21 PM, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> wrote:
> Apparently libxml2 comes with a parser for "real world" HTML, which is
> very intriguing:
>
> http://www.xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-HTMLparser.html
>
> If Emacs provided a native interface to this function, we could say
>
> (parse-html "file.html")
> => (:html (:head ...) (:body ...))
>
> and get a nice parse tree out very fast.  (Parsing HTML from Emacs Lisp
> is rather slow.)
>
> Has this been discussed before and rejected?  It seems like an obvious
> idea, and would enable both easier extraction of data from HTML files,
> as well as writing a (simple) HTML renderer in Emacs Lisp.

It was discussed before here:

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-06/msg01147.html

Wasn't there a problem with linking to external libraries at that time?