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

[Andrew Kuchling]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 12:10:06PM +0200, Dinu Gherman wrote:
>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.

I won't disagree.  In fact, I'll be rougher:

	The PyXML package is currently too difficult to understand.

Generally when doing XML work I just give up and use the smaller XML
package included with Python, and updating the HOWTO in May reinforced
this.  The problems:

	* There are too many ways to do things, and no guidance about
	  which to use.  Parsing an XML document?  There's qp_xml.py,
	  pulldom.py, SAX readers, DOM readers, xmllib, pyexpat?
	  Printing an XML document?  sax/writer.py or dom.ext.Printer?
          What's the difference between these choices?  Which ones are
	  deprecated?  

	* Some things, such as XSLT are simply broken; they don't work
          at all.  (Or maybe it'll work if I installed 4Suite; the
	  README currently says you shouldn't install the xml.xslt
	  package from PyXML, though.)

We really need to do better, but it's not clear what to do.  
Is it simply a documentation problem?  Perhaps.  But we *must*
do something about this.

>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?

The online Python Cookbook has an XML section; Uche has also started a
collection of processing tips.  

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

Done.

--amk                                                             (www.amk.ca)
HAMLET: A little more than kin, and less than kind.
    -- _Hamlet_, I, ii