Re: [xml] loading concatenated documents

[Ethan Tira-Thompson <ejt cmu edu>]

Hi Daniel, thanks for the feedback.

> [1]     document       ::=       prolog  element  Misc*
> ...
>  NEVER STACK XML DOCUMENTS

This is an unfortunate design decision.  I'm not going to close and reopen a network connection for each of a 
series of short and frequently-sent XML documents just so the parser can verify the eof, it's pedantic.  The 
parser knows the document (or at least the root node) has ended, and by default it makes sense to complain if 
there's extra characters afterward, but there should be a way to tell libxml to ignore it.  I'm not trying to 
claim my entire stream is a valid XML document, I only claim each of the documents in the stream is valid, 
and it would be nice to have better support for the situation.

The direct workaround, to make the IO read callback duplicate the parsing functionality of looking for the 
close tag for the root node, is error prone.  libxml is already doing this, I shouldn't have to reimplement 
this functionality myself.

If nothing else, since you already have the save-as-fragment functionality, it's odd you don't also have the 
load-as-fragment... this situation also arises if you know you have some XML embedded in something else 
(maybe more XML, maybe not) and you just want to parse just that chunk for efficiency.

-Ethan