[XML-SIG] minidom: Genius or just plain bad?

[Stefan Behnel]

Philipp Hagemeister wrote:
> Wouldn't be nice to have a full-fledged XML implementation in the Python
> stdlib? Probably not (yet) including validation, XSLT and similar
> auxiliary technologies, but come on, XML namespaces and DOM 3 L/S should
> be supported.

This has been rejected on python-dev lately, given that such an
implementation would almost certainly introduce a major dependency overhead
if it's not written in plain Python. There's also the historical problem
that the stdlib XML support is there and quite a bit of existing code
depends on it. Replacing that with a new implementation would break all
that. Extending it is a, well, rather large project, as would be any kind
of major performance improvement.

It's not too hard to install lxml these days, though. The fact that it
*doesn't* use the DOM3 API is actually a major strength.

http://codespeak.net/lxml/

Stefan