Re: [Libxmlplusplus-general] Status

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld sympatico ca>]

Murray Cumming wrote:

> We had already stated (not clearly) that no-one should create Nodes or
> Attributes directly. I would not expect the API to work if someone did.

stating it is one thing, making certain things impossible by correctly
using the 'public' and 'private' keywords is another.

> > The Node constructor/destructors are called by libxml2 when the 
> > corresponding xmlNode, xmlAttr, etc. objects are created/destroyed,
> > meaning the implementation (xmlNode) owns its own wrapper (xmlpp::Node).
>
>
> Is that an additional point? It seems like implementation to me?

ownership semantics is certainly more than an implementation detail.
It's part of the semantics of the API.

If I look int a new API and I find functions methods that return object
pointers, my first question is 'who owns that' ?

And if the answer is 'the callee', I'd ask 'and how can I create an 
object that is not owned by the callee' ? Etc., you get the idea.

In the context of manipulating a DOM tree, an important question is
(as I already mentioned) how to take out a subtree, put it into
another context, or even another document. That's something that
hasn't been addressed yet, and which should be added before the
API can be considered complete.

Stefan