From: Sean O'Dell <sean@...>
Date: 2002-04-10T10:30:59+09:00
Subject: Re: REXML 2.1.0

"Sean Russell" <ser@germane-software.com> wrote in message
news:83173408.0204071930.75626937@posting.google.com...
> I'd like to apologize to everybody on the list who have been posting
> questions about REXML; I've been having to access c.l.ruby via Google
> Groups, which -- while a godsend for those deprived of usenet access
> -- is a perfect example of why HTML is /not/ an adequate GUI for all
> applications.  In any case, I read messages on the list rarely these
> days, and this probably won't change in the near future.
>
> Please note that the API docs are now a separate download.  As I say
> in the documentation, you'll do yourself a favor if you install rdoc
> and generate the docs yourselves; it'll save you a download, and rdoc
> is a really nice package, albeit a bit twitchy at the moment.
>
> This release includes some IO and general speed optimizations. Parsing
> large documents should be faster, and the overall package recovers
> some speed lost through feature (and conformance) creep.
>
> I've finally added support for ISO-8859-1, UNILE, and UTF-16 output.
> REXML now tries to respect the encoding (if it is one of the above, or
> UTF-8), and writes out what it gets in.  You MUST always use UTF-8
> internally.  You can NOT pass Element.text= or Text.new anything other
> than UTF-8.  You never could, but I hadn't mentioned this in the docs,
> and it has caused some people grief.
>
> I fixed up pretty-printing a bit, and updated the tutorial a little.
> It needs more work, but it shouldn't have any glaring inconsistancies
> any more.
>
> I got a request to change the behavior of Element.attributes.each.  It
> now itterates over |key,value| pairs, rather than attributes. This
> seemed to be a reasonably request to me, and since there is already an
> explicit each_attribute, I decided to make the change.
>
> The unit tests have been expanded, and subsequently a number of
> obscure bugs were fixed.  I love unit tests.  Heck, I'd rather write
> unit tests than code these days.  Mmmmm... unit tests...
>
> Fixed a bug in namespace handling in attributes, and completely
> updated the API documentation for Element, Element.Elements, and
> Element.Attributes; the rest of the classes to follow.  I'm seriously
> contemplating removing the examples from the API documentation,
> because most of them are practically duplicates of the unit tests in
> test/.  I suppose I should solicit feedback about this, but nobody
> looks at the unit tests anyway, so I expect I'll just get a lot of
> people telling me to leave the code snippits in there.
>
> Downloads at the usual place:
>
>   http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml
>
> Thanks for your attention, and thanks again to all of the great people
> who pester me with bug reports.

Thank you for your work on REXML, Sean...it's a very cool XML library.

    Sean O'Dell