I've only looked at some of the posts on this thread so I haven't followed everythihg there. I'm curious as to why spirit - which includes an XML parser - has not been mentioned. I used it to great effect with the serialization library. Yes it is effort to learn to use spirit - and I only learned the bare minimum to get it to work for the serialization library. But it was a lot better then spending (a lot more) time writing xml parsing from scratch. Even more importantly, its much, much easier to maintain as it's basically data driven code. It seems that lots of the functionality being discussed is available "right out of the box" with spirit and the include xml examples. Want a DOM style parser - I believe that something similar is available "out of the box" with the included parse tree generator. Want a SAX style parser, Specify your own action routines as tokens are recogized.
but I would like to see at least these different APIs: * on-demand parsing, a parser drived by a cursor, that allows to navigate through a document, without loading it completly (I dont see a need for prior validation, here)
The serialization library does exactly this with the spirit xml parser. ...
* direct mapper of c++ structures to a certain format, so a kind of xml serialization,
I'm not sure how this differs from the xml serialization already in the serialization library. I'm exactly sure what you have in mind, but I can see the need for a program which reads and xml schema and generates C++ data structures which can be navigated with previously compiled code modules. I think this would be fairly easily achieved using spirit xml parsing. As you can see, I think spirit is underrated. It IS hard to learn - and I'm in no way an expert but I have managed to find it very useful. Robert Ramey