From: Alan Chen <alan@...>
Date: 2001-11-15T06:47:20+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:25218] Re: XML support in the standard lib;whatexactly?

On Thu, Nov 15, 2001 at 05:24:35AM +0900, John Carter wrote:
> Am I wrong? Can anyone think of any counter examples?

How about porting of libraries and components expecting to access XML
via DOM? Right now I'm considering porting XMLtoDBMS - a perl library
that uses XML to ease DBMS access. If there were a DOM interface to
ruby's XML layer, I'm thinking that it would be possible to write a
tool to convert the perl to ruby as a first pass porting
effort. Without, a DOM interface, I need to port all the XML accesses
by hand.

> Otherwise lets have no more of this "Ruby standard XML library needs to
> have the standard DOM API" talk.
> 
> The DOM API is broken by design, built to the lowest common denominator.
> Its a pain and a suffering.

I'm not saying that ruby needs to only provide access to its XML via
DOM.  I don't even think having DOM should be a central priority for
XML parsing in Ruby.  But many xml components and libraries which
might be ported to Ruby will be ported more directly if a DOM api
exists in ruby. Because DOM is already familiar to many programmers
outside of Ruby, this also might be a way to attract XML programmers.
I think theres plenty of room for Ruby to have a ruby-way API as well
as industry standard XML API's.  Open source is all about letting
people work in thier area of need/interest and collaborating in a
coordinated fashion.


-- 
Alan Chen
Digikata LLC
alan@digikata.com
http://digikata.com