[gdome]libxml v. Xerces-C

[Murray Cumming <murrayc usa net>]

A few months ago we on the gtkmm list talked about 'approving' an xml parser
for use with Gtk--/Gnome--. I preferred Xerces-C because it is a currently
existing and mature C++ parser. However, it would be nicer to have a good C++
wrapper for libxml, which is the official XML parser for GNOME. Also, some
people expressed some concern that the Xerces-C smart-pointer system didn't
fit with the rest of Gtk--/Gnome--.

Recently, I've been trying to wrap Gdome2, which is the GNOME DOM2
imlementation based on libxml2 internally. I thought that it would be wise to
jump to gdome2 because it seems like a future replacement for the libxml API.
Of course I am ignoring the SAX interface.

However, gdome uses a reference-counting system, though it doesn't use
GObject. A wrapper for this system might be similar to the proposed
GObject::create() system. At best, every GDome-- class would be a smart
pointer.

This is exactly the same system used by Xerces-C. So, both GDome-- and
Xerces-C would have the same memory management model, the same class and
method names (defined by the W3C DOM spec), and both support utf8 in the API
(as required by GTK/GNOME 2). So it seems silly to create GDome-- because it
would look just like Xerces-C. Comments?

Murray Cumming
murrayc usa net
www.murrayc.com

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