[ruby-talk:11454] Re: XML (was: trial balloon: Ruby desktop?)

David Alan Black wrote:
>On Sat, 24 Feb 2001, Kevin Smith wrote:
>> Me neither. I got frustrated trying to find a 
>> simple HTML/XML parser, so I wrote my own (in C++ 
>> at work). It was about 150 lines and did exactly 
>> what I needed it to do.
>
>There *really* is (much) more to expat than finding tags.  I have
>nothing riding on whether anyone does or does not use it (but note
>that if you use the Ruby xmlparser, you're using expat; ditto for
>XML::Parser in Perl).  But I would like to discourage even mild
>disparagement of James Clark's work, which is, to my mind, phenomenal,

Sorry if I offended. I am thrilled that James 
Clark has contributed so much, and agree that 
expat is very powerful.

In my case, I just wanted something that just did 
one thing, simply and well, that I could 
understand quickly. I couldn't find one, so I 
rolled my own (in a couple hours). And it was the 
right thing to do.

Most libraries and apps are (IMHO) needlessly 
complex and therefore needlessly large. But that 
reflects my lifelong bias toward simplicity, as 
well as my recent interest in XP.

It seems like a non-validating SAX-style XML 
parser written in Ruby could be very small and 
quite simple. But I don't know if anyone would 
really be interested in it. 

Kevin