Matthew Butterick wrote on 02/28/2015 06:49 PM:
If the latter, then you may find that using native Racket data
structures (esp. the X-expression) and native XML-friendly functions
(like `match`) is more convenient.
Either SXML or X-expressions are OK for most purposes.
But, IMHO, SXML is somewhat better than Racket X-expressions for most
purposes.
I tried X-expressions a few years ago, to try it while rapidly coding a
research Web app, and it was OK for that purposes. But before and since
then, I've ended up preferring SXML for various XML and HTML work.
I think the hurdles to SXML use in Racket are:
* the libraries are not always neatly packaged, nor documented as
libraries; and
* X-expressions are in official Racket, perhaps because they were
already used for the old DrScheme documentation browser(?) before SXML
caught on with everyone else, so people looking now assume that
X-expressions are the way to go.
FWIW, I put some specification and coding work into trying to unify SXML
and Racket X-expressions. In the end, I decided that SXML's decisions
on things like splicing -- which I originally thought were messy, and
unnecessarily hard to implement in general-purposes SXML libraries --
turned out to be better design decisions for practical use. For
example, regarding splicing for efficient (immutable) manipulation,
after I implemented a splicing construct in the unified language, I
decided that Oleg's original approach was more elegant in practice. So
I threw out that unified stuff, and ended up with just a few small
tweaks to SXML.
Neil V.
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