Re: [boost] Proposal: XML APIs in boost

From: Doug Gregor (dgregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-01 14:36:11

On Nov 1, 2005, at 1:26 PM, Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
> Scenario 1: I prefer parse documents
> Scenario 2: I prefer parse documents
> Scenario 3: I prefer parse documents
> Scenario 4: I prefer parse documents

That's a lot of parsing.

> I could list a lot of different usage  schemes with different 
> tradeoffs.
> Eventually it bound to affect XML parser interface in regards to 
> Unicode

The parsing interface in an XML library will be a handful of functions, 
with a single overloaded name, that take in 
iterators/streams/filenames/URLs/whatever and produce an XML document. 
In user code, parsing will take about 5 lines of code:

try {
   doc = parse_xml(input);
   process_xml_doc(doc);
} catch (xml_input_error&) {
   // report failure
}

A library should focus on what people really spend their time on. For 
XML, this is navigating, traversing, and manipulating XML documents, 
not parsing. Get a solid, usable interface for that and we'll have a 
Boost XML library. Leave XML parsing to the underlying library (Stefan 
wisely chose libxml2) and revisit it later for those few users that 
need the full parsing expressivity that you describe.

        Doug