Re: Saving markup formats

[Nic James Ferrier]

Juri Linkov <address@hidden> writes:

>>> A good embedded XML parser would be needed. I've thought about taking
>>> time out to add libxml2 support natively to emacs. That would do the
>>> job very well.
>>
>> Did you try nxml-mode?
>
> Do you mean `nxml-parse-file'?  I find it more restrictive than
> `xml-parse-file' from xml.el.  It fails on more XML files.
>
> Do you know a tidy-like XML parser for Emacs that would correct
> not well-formed XML and not choke on them?

This is the thing isn't it? Emacs has lots of good elisp based XML
support but none of it quite cuts the mustard for all the different
things one might do with XML.

nxml is a very good editor... but not so good for DOM programming.

xml.el has *some* good DOM stuff, but it's parser is a little weak and
there's poor error support.

Binding a really good XML library into Emacs would solve a bunch of
low level problems. It would mean that we could reasonably write
programs to manipulate a whole host of different documents and data
formats. It would also mean that nxml-mode type functionality would be
much easier to do.

In my view what emacs needs in the word processing arena is the
ability to read and write a lot of file formats (which are often XML
based now) and manipulate those DOMs in a way that is consistent with
the native editor.

For example, I don't care if Emacs renders an OO document as something
like an nxml document as long as I have ways of quickly adding a list
item, making a new paragraph, inserting a formula into a table, etc...

-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk