Re: XML tools for Octave

[Bill Denney]

On Thu, 29 Jun 2006, Andy Adler wrote:

> I honestly don't know how to address this. Your suggestion would 
> basically mean that we expose the full DOM API. Matlab did this with a 
> thin wrapper over Java's DOM.
>
> However, this is a really bad idea. It means that all the effort of
> XML parsing falls on the user - who will either make mistakes or
> shortcuts, with the result of really fragile code.
>
> For example a user will parse
>     <data><item> 1 </item></data>
>
> using
>   v.data.CHILD{1}.item.TEXT{1}
>
> But this will break when you have
>     <data> <item> 1 </item></data>
>
> or
>     <data><metadata/><item> 1 </item></data>

That's true, but users will always write fragile code like that.  One 
option around this would be to have options like "strip-space" (taking 
a cue from XSL: http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/el_preserve-space.asp) that 
would relatively intelligently help the user.  Perhaps make stripping 
spaces the default would be most helpful to the users.

> So I don't think that pushing all the complexity to the user is right.
> Somehow it should be easy to do easy things, but possible to do correct 
> things.
>
> How about:
> <a b="c" d="e"> text <f g="h"/> more text <f>data</f> </a>
>
> v.a.ATTS.b      : "c"
> v.a.ATTS.d      : "e"
> v.a.TEXT{1}     : " text "
> v.a.TEXT{2}     : " more text "
> v.a.TEXT{3}     : " "
> v.a.f{1}.g      : "h"
> v.a.f{2}.TEXT{1}: "data"
>
> and some extra information in:
>
> v.a.NAMESPACE
> v.a.ORDEREDELEMS
> v.a.UTFNAMES
>
> This is starting to look like a big project ;-<

How would you do ORDEREDELEMS?  Would that be the entire file again or 
would it just be some sort of permutation vector?

Bill

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