Sebastian Redl wrote:
I know that two Boost-internal uses could work with a pull API very well: Property Tree's XML reader and the Serialization XML archive.
To sum up, I do believe we should reinvent the wheel here. But we should create an improved wheel, and I think the Boost community is uniquely suited to create a wheel that works particularly well with C++.
If you've looked at serialization of xml you'll see that it uses spirit and an xml grammer derived from a complete one included in the spirit library. If you really don't want to re-invent the wheel, they why not just use the same approach? The spirit library contains a very complete XML grammer already. I don't recall this even having been considered - much less rejected. Creating XML is easy. Handling issues of code conversion (e.g. from locale specific code to UTF-8 or UTF-16) is easily handled with i/o stream facets - some of which are also already available. It is also already "Boost Friendly" and works with all boost platforms. It also does most of the heavy lifting at compile time - very much in line with other boost tools. I can't understand why any other approach would be attractive for users of other boost libraries. To me the whole idea is "re-inventing the wheel" Robert Ramey