Re: [Re: [Re: [libxml++] UTF8 support]]

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld sympatico ca>]

Murray Cumming wrote:

> > are you serious ? Are you telling us you want to constrain an API just
> > because your documenting tool can't cope with more advanced techniques ?
>
>
> It's just one of many considerations, and maybe not the most important. I do
> expect people to understand an API via the API's documentation rather than the
> header files, and I do know that it's unrealistic to expect hand-written
> documentation to be accurate or even up-to-date.

I fully agree about the importance of having good automatically
generated docs. But never ever would I make an important design choice
dependent on the availability of a documentation tool that can cope with
it. If the tool has a problem, fix it. (and yes, that's what I did: I
did run into problems with doxygen years ago, and so I started
'synopsis': http://synopsis.sf.net).

> Hopefully it is clear that I am listing pros and cons and points in general. I
> am saying that Doxygen CAN do this for us. That's good. That's not a reason
> NOT to use this API. Please calm down.

yes, I understand. I'm just wondering why you even bring up the topic of
manual reference generation when we are arguing about API changes.


> OK. May I ask, please, if it's OK, if it wouldn't upset you terribly, why you
> aren't using the XML parser that's included in Qt? It's a question not any
> kind of statement. I know nothing about Qt's XML parser.

well, actually, I'd prefer to use just the GUI subset of Qt. But since
writing a unicode library is quite a job, we consider to use it. We
don't do much unicode related stuff, i.e. I even expect most xml
documents to contain plain ascii. But we have of course to be
prepared...

As to the xml API shipping with Qt, I don't know it well. I think
libxml2 is an excellent tool, and all it needs (to satisfy me :-) is a
good C++ wrapper. DV told me the 'private' member in all the libxml2
structs are there for exactly this purpose, so I started to write a C++
wrapper around that. You know the rest...

Back to the point: I use this C++ wrapper in a couple of projects. I
don't want to deal with more than one if not absolutely necessary.

There is currently no standard C++ API for XML processing. I'm
considering to make a proposal to boost: http://www.boost.org. But of
course, anything that will have a chance of getting in needs to be 
generic, as standard (C++) compliant as possible, and well focussed...

Regards,
		Stefan