On Nov 1, 2005, at 1:26 PM, Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
Scenario 1: I prefer parse documents Scenario 2: I prefer parse documents Scenario 3: I prefer parse documents Scenario 4: I prefer parse documents
That's a lot of parsing.
I could list a lot of different usage schemes with different tradeoffs. Eventually it bound to affect XML parser interface in regards to Unicode
The parsing interface in an XML library will be a handful of functions, with a single overloaded name, that take in iterators/streams/filenames/URLs/whatever and produce an XML document. In user code, parsing will take about 5 lines of code: try { doc = parse_xml(input); process_xml_doc(doc); } catch (xml_input_error&) { // report failure } A library should focus on what people really spend their time on. For XML, this is navigating, traversing, and manipulating XML documents, not parsing. Get a solid, usable interface for that and we'll have a Boost XML library. Leave XML parsing to the underlying library (Stefan wisely chose libxml2) and revisit it later for those few users that need the full parsing expressivity that you describe. Doug