[DOC-SIG] SGML Working Group

[Sean Mc Grath]

I would like to see basic XML support provided as a portable C extension module.
I believe XML will take off and that the XML support in Python
will be sufficently useful to go into the standard
distribution.

1) XML processing must be fast. Microsoft build but criticise Java XML parsers
over speed issues and trumpet Windows specific ActiveX components as
a "solution" to the speed issues. Lets not allow the same charge be leveled
at Python.

2) I believe the speed difference will be *significant*. I have Python + C
implementation of a LoadEsis treebuilding library for Python (the tree building
process for XML will be analagous I suspect). The C one is massively faster.

At the very least, we could include a C based XML lexer to take care of
some of the hairy bits and spit out basic XML tokens. Python layers could
site on top of that to do well formedness checks/tree building/validation.
James Clark has
written such a thing (in Ansi C) and made it freely available.

Sean Mc Grath
sean at digitome dot com




_______________
DOC-SIG  - SIG for the Python Documentation Project

send messages to: doc-sig@python.org
administrivia to: doc-sig-request@python.org
_______________