just my two cents... portability is a key issue...i work on several platforms and trying to hook into expat isnt allways trivial... So, 1. Ruby should ship with a ruby implementation of sax, dom which would work without hassles on all platforms... 2. Ruby could/should ship with sax, dom using a 'standard' parser, such as expat or xerces... one could also look at the xmldigester http://www.helenius.dk/ruby/digester/ which is an alternate way of using xml... Mikkel -----Original Message----- From: Tobias Reif To: ruby-talk / ruby-lang.org Sent: 12-11-2001 15:41 Subject: [ruby-talk:24931] XML support in the standard lib; what exactly? What exactly to include in the standard lib? For example: All conforming to the latest final version of the respective spec (recommendation), and feature complete: for DOM, this could be: http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Traversal-Range/ http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Style/ http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/ parsers and APIs (all supporting namespaces): SAX parser + SAX API DOM parser + DOM API DOM parser + alternative tree API (DOM/JDOM/REXML/ElectricXML/ -like) (or is an extra tree-/DOM-like parser needed?) If the DOM API and the DOM-like API are separate it's easier to write pure DOM programs the two libs are nicely saparated and not too big merged into one 'DOM plus extensions' lib: there is no redundancy (some DOM features don't need an alternative, and are written only once) writers: XML XHTML nice to haves for the standard lib: validating parsers that support DTDs & Schemas nice to haves, probably RAA stuff): http://www.w3.org/TR/SAC/ SVG writer [some more things; but this post is about the standard lib ;) ] Personally, I'd be happy to see the alternative tree parser + API included first, with an XML writer. (Currently, I don't need SAX and DOM.) Something like REXML, if/as soon as it's 100% conformant as a non-validating XML processor, and its' API leaves nothing to be desired from the DOM API. Tobi -- Tobias Reif http://www.pinkjuice.com/myDigitalProfile.xhtml go_to('www.ruby-lang.org').get(ruby).play.create.have_fun http://www.pinkjuice.com/ruby/