Re: [boost] [xml] Brainstorming / Request for Comments, Suggestions, Opinions ...

From: loufoque (mathias.gaunard_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-09-08 08:59:40

Jon Radoff wrote :

> b) Those that are complete have very annoying and/or intractable dependencies.  Examples:  Libxml++ is simply a beast to build (lots of GNOME/Glib dependencies, and it produces compiler errors on MSVC that are left to the implementor to fix);

That's because libxml++ wanted to use a special string type for unicode 
  that was available in glibmm (glib C++ wrapper).
You can disable this though and handle the utf-8 through std::string, 
which removes the dependencies, and probably the building problems with 
older MSVC versions. (current versions of gtkmm/glibmm are known to 
support MSVC8 only)

I think using such a string type is a good idea though, but something 
available as a self-supporting library would be better.

>  3) I think DOM support is critical.  There's ample C++ libraries and wrappers for doing non-DOM XML manipulations, but there doesn't seem to be adequate options for good DOM libraries.  It seems to me that if the library implementor doesn't tackle the challenge of making a nice C++ DOM class interface, then I'm left with the impression that boost wouldn't really be adding anything new to the world.

While DOM is memory consuming, it's still the simplest way I can think 
of to edit an existing XML document.
Moreoever it is the standard API. So of course supporting it is very 
important.