[XML-SIG] understanding the sources. wher to start?

[Dinu Gherman]

info@mjais.de:

> I know some python and some xml and I have been playing 
> a bit with PyXML. I want to get a deeper understanding 
> of all the stuff (dom, sax, how parsers work). Can you 
> give me some advice where to start when I want to under-
> stand the sources.
>
> I bought two books about Python and XML (one from Oreilly 
> and the other is "definitive xml development" from pren-
> tice hall) but I have not read much yet. Do you have any 
> other recommendations of books or online resources
> where to find out more about this topic?

If you mean a "Guide to the PyXML and std. Python XML
sources" you won't have much luck! I don't know the PH
book, but I translated the O'Reilly one into German
and while I think this is a really useful book I don't
think it will help you that much with understanding the
lower level package structures. Being an intro to XML
with Python it was most likely not the authors' goal
and that's ok.

If you poked already in the code here and there and have
reached some decent frustration, I know what you mean.
Other people might disagree, but I think at the moment
one must poke around a bit if one really wants to under-
stand what's going on and how some things really work.

The best advice I can give is actually to get started,
maybe looking sometimes into the test suites, although
this will not always suffice. 

After just checking the XML-HowTo it seems to me like 
it was expanded significantly over the last months,
which is good. I'm not sure how much people here like 
Wikis, but that could be a way to collect people's Py-
thon/XML experience, snippets and sugestions for im-
provements, maybe, unless they already exist?

While speaking of improvements... would anybody with the
right permissions mind to add a link to pyRXP on the 
following page:

  http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/software.html

saying something like this:

"""
<tr>
  <td valign=top><a href="http://www.reportlab.com/xml/pyrxp.html">pyRXP</a></td>

  <td valign=top>
pyRXP is a Python wrapper for RXP, a very fast validating 
XML parser (written by Richard Tobin of the University of 
Edinburgh) and returns Python tuple trees from XML.
  </td>
</tr>
"""

Thanks and regards,

Dinu