XML, Python, XML-SIG, documentation, PyXml, 4

[Martin v. Loewis]

andrew at acooke.org (andrew cooke) writes:

> The web pages at http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/ seems to be out
> of date.  In particular, the download talks about 0.6.6 when at
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyxml there's a version of PyXml at
> version 7.0 from December last year.  

No, that version is 0.7.0. Using 0.6.6 is still reasonable. I don't
think the Web pages are out of date.

> Which of these packages should I use, and what documentation will help
> me, if I want to:
> 
> - automatically generate a tree from the XML file (I believe this is
> related to the DOM)

Yes, you can use the DOM for that. There are a number of alternative
DOM implementations: Python 2 comes with a package called "minidom";
PyXML has an implementation called "4DOM".

> - supply a class to some (already existing) tree walking code that
> does local rearrangements of the XML data

That is not really supported; you can try the traversal interface of
4DOM, but few people use it, so expect to run into problems.

> - automatically generate an XML file from the modified tree

All DOM implementations support this in some form.

> Also, I know that it's boring updating web sites, and that this is all
> a volunteer effort, but the current XML pages are not very useful.  It
> would be less confusing to simply point people to the mailing list
> archives, rather than to incomplete HOWTO documents that were last
> changed years ago.  

On http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/, there *is* a link to the
mailing list archives. The HOWTO document, to my knowledge, is still
correct (even if admittedly incomplete).

> Perhaps the links to the sourceforge pages would be useful too.

Not sure what pages you are talking about here: The pages you were
complaining about *are* on SourceForge.

Regards,
Martin