--- Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: To answer a question you asked on an earlier thread, this is one of the ways that Perl makes doing XML difficult.
Q: "What's the right CPAN lib to pull for parsing/rewriting XML?"
A: Look, we've got a plethora of XML libs, all indistinguishable at first glance. You'll need to do a week-long research project to figure out what's what! OK?
I understand this issue very clearly, but I don't think it's Perl's fault. There have been talks on and off about a Perl-XML SDK for at least two or three years, and it's not easy.
We have standardised interop between modules on PerlSAX. If there is sufficient community pressure, we have all the drafts ready to do the same thing with PerlDOM in a shortish timeframe (it just seems that people are happy with XML::LibXML). We're standardising the selection of transforming modules right now.
However that will only help so much. If you want to jump into XML processing and you don't know about SAX or DOM (related or not Perl) you have some homework to do. You don't need to master them, but you need to have an idea of the ways in which they work.
Also, it is by and large recognised outside the bounds of our community that Perl's wealth in XML processing is that while most other languages have just DOM and SAX, we have all sorts of alternatives like XML::Twig, XML::Essex, XML::Simple and so forth that make things much easier when you have specific requirements. We're possibly the only language with three or four different transformation packages...
Which of those would go in a core lib or SDK? The ones that correspond to XML standards are used a lot and standard so they'd probably be in (with C libs dependencies issues), others are non-standard but also used much, others aren't used a lot but are so good they really should be... Then you get to the modules that interface to specific languages such as RDF or SVG, and it's a mess to deal with. All things considered, less energy might be spent by people spending a week researching Perl XML modules all together than on the creation of an SDK ;)
It's a complex set of issues, and if we're to work on it that work can be done with Perl 5 modules, on the perl-xml list, right now, independently from p6l issues. Otherwise p6l will probably get to know *much* more about XML than it wants to, and the perl-xml community will be excluded from choices on stuff that concerns it very directly.
Well, rather than having a slew of subtly incompatible XML interfaces, ...
All the major ones should support SAX 2 for interop by now. If there are incompatibilities you can certainly file a bug report.
So I guess, at the language level I'm asking if there's a process in place to identify these essential libs and to move forward on them?
Ask the people that use them?
-- Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Research Engineer, Expway http://expway.fr/ 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
