Quoting Peter K.Lee ([EMAIL PROTECTED]):
> > * What does the "char-sets" column mean? It says "UTF-8 w/o Unicode" for
> > cxml; I can't make sense of that.
> Me neither. :) But that is how it is reported in the cxml page.
I take that to mean that the CXML documentation is not elaborate enough
on this. Do you have a suggestion where in the documentation to write
more about it? What kind of information would you have liked to see?
> Other parsers make cursory notes about character sets it supports as
> well. I'd be happy to update the column to make it more sane if
> someone can shed some light on what it really means...
Well, partly I was asking what the column was meant to be about.
UTF-8 is not a character set, it's an encoding.
* The "character set" XML parsers use is, by definition, Unicode.
Every XML parser must deal with Unicode.
* A different question is which "encodings" a parser supports. Now, every
parser is required by the spec to support both UTF-8 and and UTF-16.
If it doesn't, that's a topic for a bugs section, not so much for a
features comparision. In a feature comparison, it would be interesting
to know which *other* encodings a parser supports.
For example, CXML seems to support iso-8859-n and koi8-r (hmm, whatever
that is :-)) in addition to UTF-8 and UTF-16.
(Ideally, an XML parser in Lisp [an a Unicode-ware implementation]
would support all external formats supported by the host Lisp, but
that can be a portability issue.)
* Yet another question is which encodings the serializer supports.
For example, CXML has built-in support for UTF-8 serializer (even on
non-unicode aware Lisps) and leaves all other encodings to the host
Lisp. (Prepend your own XML declarations and use a character stream
sink with the external-format you need.)
> > * Somehow I'd like a column "Makes an effort to conform to the
> > standards". AFAIK only CL-XML and CXML qualify for a "yes" there.
>
> I'm not exactly sure how to quantify "making an effort to conform to
> the standards". It appears that XML syntax is a particular standard
> that all the XML parsing libraries conform to, and the rest of the
Well, there is a indeed standard for XML 1.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/
and there is a very good test suite for that standard
http://www.w3.org/XML/Test/
> "techniques" of parsing vary widely. If the XML parser does not do
> validation,
No, there are validating and non-validating parsers. The XML test suite
has tests for both of them. It's fine for a parser to state that it
doesn't support validation, it is still a conforming non-validating
parser.
> or provide the W3C DOM API, does that mean it is not
> making an effort to conform to the standards?
A XML parser does not have to implement DOM by any means. It is
definitely an optional feature. If it does claim to implement it, it
should pass the DOM test suite, however.
Same for XML namespaces. That is also an optional, separate
specification and covered by specially tagged tests in the XML
conformance test suite.
> -Peter
Thanks,
David
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