Re: Problems with xml-parse-string

[Wojciech Meyer]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Chong Yidong <address@hidden> wrote:
> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Chong Yidong <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> So either the new libxml functions have to provide the same format as
>>> xml.el, or xml.el has to be changed to used the new format, breaking
>>> existing uses.  I am amenable to the latter if the new format is so much
>>> better than the old one that it's worth dealing with the backward
>>> compatibility headaches.
>>
>> I'd volunteer for changing the callers to use the new format if you
>> change xml.el to do the same.
>
> First let me clarify a technical detail.  In your new format,
>
>  (catalog
>   (text . "\n   ")
>   (book
>     (:type . "manual")
>     (text . "\n      ")
>     (title
>       (text . "GNU Emacs manual"))
>     (text . "\n   "))
>   (text . "\n"))
>
> seems to assume that element names never start with the colon character.
> That is, there can never be an element named ":type".
>
> The XML spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/) seems to
> indicate that element names are allowed to start with a colon; see the
> definition of NameStartChar in section 2.3.
>
> It looks like the new format would give ambiguous results in that case.

My personal opinion, is to stick with something that is standardized - SXml
that handles all the cases, and have one and only one uniform representation.

If nobody is up to this, I would volunteer to implement the SXml backend.

Thanks,
Wojciech