Re: [xml] xmlIO extensions

[Christian Engwer <christi uni-hd de>]

Hello Daniel,

>   Well that's the problem with your other question, what is the usefulness
> of adding seek() support when clearly this won't work for FTP and HTTP
> (or not work better than a read to /dev/null)...

I did dive into the http/ftp code yet, but from the documentation it
seems, as if ftp and http firstt get the data, store it in a local
file and then operate on this file. Well... this clearly would offer
the posibility to operate on this temporary file.

>   I'm afraid too that this would force breaking some of the older APIs
> in libxml2 (or force a duplication).

This the main problem. A seek is not part of libxml2 yet and it would
break the API... realy ugly...

>   I'm not 100% convinced we really need something like seek() at
> the libxml2 level.

I'd clearly prefer an other solution, but I would prefere not to
create more temporary files. These always create portability
problems. mktemp and these calls are libc and I'm afraid they don't
exist under win32.

Anyway I don't think it would be very clever to write extra http:zip:
or ftp:zip: handler.

Bye Christian