Re: emacs and libxml2 (for emacs w3)

[James Clark]

Richard Stallman wrote:

> We could make Emacs link with it if that is technically a good idea.

It does not seem a technically good idea to me.  I think it's much 
better to have a XML library designed specifically to work with Emacs 
from the start and I see no compelling reason for it to be in C.  Using 
a general-purpose XML parser like libxml2 would be very limiting.  For 
example, an Emacs-specific parser can be designed to take advantage of 
the after-change-functions hook and do incremental parsing and 
validation. A typical general-purpose parser like libxml2 is not 
designed to do this sort of thing.

For the last few months, I've been working on new XML support for Emacs. 
 There's a user-oriented overview of the initial release at:

  http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=2061

It's built on top of a low-level XML parsing layer that's designed to 
support a broad range of different kinds of XML processing that are 
useful in Emacs, such as

- font lock

- XML syntax aware editing (functionality like parse-partial-sexp for XML)

- incremental validation to support context/schema-sensitive completion 
(like PSGML)

- doing what xml.el does (i.e. parsing XML into a list form that is 
convenient for further processing in Lisp)

It's still early days, but I think this is technically a better 
direction that linking to a general-purpose XML library like libxml2.

James