[Twisted-Python] regarding xml elements
Phil Christensen
phil at bubblehouse.org
Sat Mar 29 20:56:56 EDT 2008
On Mar 28, 2008, at 7:33 PM, Jean-Paul Calderone wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 22:59:21 -0000, glyph at divmod.com wrote:
>> On 02:55 pm, exarkun at divmod.com wrote:
>>> On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:51:10 -0400, Phil Christensen
>>> <phil at bubblehouse.org> wrote:
>>
>>>> If it's so bad that you'd tell someone not to use it, why isn't
>>>> it deprecated?
>>
>>> Because it would take a lot of work to deprecate, and there are a
>>> lot of
>>> other things people are working on that are deemed more important.
>>
>> Also because there isn't a complete consensus on how terrible it
>> is. If you are doing advanced XML processing, it definitely isn't
>> the best choice, because it's missing a bunch of features and it
>> has some idiosyncratic behavior. However, it is conveniently
>> available without adding another dependency and it supports simple
>> use-cases OK; this is still a problem with other XML libraries in
>> Python, especially DOM libraries. (For example, incompatibilities
>> between the various lxml implementations.)
>
> Here's an example of a behavior it has which probably isn't going
> to change
> any time soon:
>
> >>> from twisted.web.microdom import parseString
> >>> s = '<div><span>hello</span> <span>world</span></div>'
> >>> parseString(s).toxml()
> '<?xml version="1.0"?><div><span>hello</span><span>world</span></
> div>'
> >>>
> So if you need such advanced XML features as correct whitespace
> handling,
> steer clear. ;)
I have to say, I don't find this to be that big an issue. I think if
you're using XML as a data interchange format (as I know the original
poster was), whitespace is generally syntactically meaningless.
In fact, in my particular usage, I'm dealing with SAML responses
which need to have a signature verified using xmlsec, and any
whitespace like that would break the signature.
I know there's a tendency among developers to immediately disregard
something that is less than perfect, but I like microdom too much to
give up on it yet ;-)...
-phil
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