Re: emacs and libxml2 (for emacs w3)

[James Clark]

Nic Ferrier wrote:

> The attraction (to me) of libxml2 is that I use it elsewhere. I know
> what it does. When I'm developing xml based tools within emacs, using
> a parser and xpath evaluator that I will use in production has value
> for me.

That doesn't seem like a good reason for the standard version of Emacs 
to link with libxml2.  The whole point of XML is to be interoperable and 
not tie you to specific tools.  I don't think one can assume that all 
Emacs users will be using libxml2 for XML processing.

Can you give examples of applications that require linking to libxml2 
rather than using libxml2 via separate programs?  One approach that 
might be worth considering is writing a little C program on top of 
libxml2 that outputs an XML document in the form of the printed 
representation of the list structure defined in xml.el and vice-versa. 
Then you could do efficient XML processing in Emacs based on libxml2 
without requiring Emacs to be linked to another library. I've been 
talking with the xml.el maintainer about how to extend this to handle 
namespaces, which are really essential for many apps these days.

James