[XML-SIG] minidom enhancements

[Martin v. Loewis]

Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com> writes:

> Yes, the DOM abstracts this, but I thought the intent of the minidom was
> to be more Pythonic.  Just as JDOM allows you to construct DOM classes
> directly, I thought minidom had the same intent.

It's not clear to me what the intent of minidom is, beyond being a DOM
Core implementation. At one point, there was an attempt to be
"minimal" in some sense, take short-cuts in the implementation, and
put undocumented restrictions on the applications. That hasn't worked
out.

These days, I view the idea of the Python DOM as being more Pythonic
than the DOM itself. However, those extensions are useful only if
documented, so if there was a documentation (in the standard Python
documentation) that grants some Pythonic API, and breaking that API is
not acceptable. This appears not to be the case of the minidom
implementation classes.

> If not, then disregard: we'll just adjust our wrapper API.

I disregard not that easily. Even undocumented aspects should not be
broken lightly; that you have been using the constructors is enough
force to question the change.

Unless Fred brings up a good reason to have a parameter-less
CharacterData __init__, I will restore the original one.

Regards,
Martin