Jake Voytko wrote:
My concern, as I indicated in the other thread, is that
[...]
are all valid XML documents, and represent the same data. If this library were solely to be used for writing, I would say that this is not an issue. However, what is written must be read.
I'm not sure what you are driving at. The parsing of XML files is well specified, and that's what libxml2 implements.
The thing I don't understand about the type-safety proposals is how they intend to take into account data that is read from a file. Suppose we write a program to neatly display XML data from any generic XML file:
boost::xml my_doc_reader(filename);
would certainly be a step, and I would expect it to contain a full XML tree after this step is said and done with no extra intervention. The XML library certainly can't instantiate the proper structs in memory if we don't know what they are. Do they exist solely for writing the document?
To me, type safety is a more specific problem than what the XML standard deals with.
Indeed, and so, for the purpose of keeping this XML proposal on track, I'd suggest to disregard any type safety issues that don't directly derive from XML well-formedness. XML validation (no matter what schema is used to define the document type, dtd, relaxng, xsd, etc.) is an add-on, and a runtime mechanism. If people want to map some specific (X)Schema to the C++ type system, let them do that, on top of boost.xml. Regards, Stefan -- ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...