XML-SIG Developers Day Session

The XML-SIG has been mostly drifting for the last year, with little attempt made to push out a 1.0 version. Part of this stemmed from external forces (little development on a Python Unicode type, no namespace support in SAX or DOM), and part stemmed from internal reasons (my getting distracted, few people having time to work on it).

We need to finish a 1.0 version as soon as possible. Paul Prescod listed some standards that should be supported: XML SAX Unicode XPath XPointer DOM XSLT. XSLT seems too far afield, but the rest are probably worthwhile candidates. (Can we prioritize them?) Issues remaining:

DOM Level 2 support

Should we switch to 4Thought's implementations of DOM, XPath, and XPointer? Participants should try to at least read through some of 4Thought's code, so they can form an opinion of its quality.

Pros:

An existing DOM Level 2 implementation.
Maintainers use it actively for real work; PyDOM maintainer has short attention span.
Has XPath and XSLT tools built on top of it. (Paul Prescod wrote a few weeks ago that "Ideally we would have one (or at most two!) implementation of each of the major specs: XML, SAX, Unicode, XPath, XPointer, XSLT, DOM"; if you take 4DOM + 4XSL + 4Path, this would mean that Unicode is the only missing piece.)
Faster than PyDOM
Potential for CORBA support by adding some extra bits

Cons:

Does anyone other than the maintainers have any experience with it? Any comments? (If you don't want to slag it off publicly, you can send me unfavorable comments privately, and I'll preserve your anonymity.)
Uses Ft.Dom package name, not xml.dom
Potential incompatibilities with existing code, Sean's book, etc. (But probably a bit of glue code will let us smooth over such problems.)
Requires releasing nodes explicitly
Requires that 4Suite base be added to XML-SIG distribution (But the only dependency, at least in the DOM, seems to be on Ft.Lib.TraceOut.)

SAX Namespace support

This requires that XML-DEV converges to some consensus on SAX2. Has it done so? Are there issues facing a SAX2 binding that we should discuss?

Unicode

We've been waiting on the official Python solution. M.-A. Lemburg is implementing a proposal (http://starship.skyport.net/~lemburg/unicode-proposal.txt) but it hasn't reached the Python CVS tree yet. Therefore, we still haven't dropped wstrop. My inclination is to do this as soon as Unicode is reasonably stable in the CVS tree.

Adding qp_xml.py

To the xml.parser package, presumably?

xmllib.py

A touchy catfight ensued on the xml-sig mailing about xmllib.py's standards compliance (with or without sgmlop). Should xmllib.py be dropped? Can we do an xmllib.py compatible class on top of Expat?

Glue for Java and COM parsers

We don't have any particular support for Java-based parsers, or Microsoft's XML-parsing COM component, but we probably should. (Still, this is probably a low priority.)