[lxml-dev] About lxml status

[Lee Brown]

Greetings!

I apologize for my mistaken presumption.  I presumed it only supported basic
Xpath functions because the examples on the lxml API web page only show basic
examples.

I am at a significant disadvantage when it comes to LXML and the underlying
libxml2/libxslt libraries as I cannot read the C source.  (Back when I took
formal programming courses, the three choices offered to engineering students
were Basic, Fortran, and this hot, up-and-coming language called Pascal which
was supposed to set the world on fire.)  All of the documentation for the
libxml2/libxslt libraries on xmlsoft.org is written from a C perspective and
checking out the source code for lxml won't help me much, either.  So I am
limited to whatever I can glean from the lxml web site examples and whatever I
can discover using the usual Python code inspection techniques.  (Which don't go
very far when much of the functionality resides in precompiled binaries.)

So really, the only way I'd be able to determine how far support for a given
X-standard goes in lxml is to write a whole bunch of test cases.  (This is how I
figured out that lxml has broad support for the Xinclude standard, even though
the lxml API page states that "simple" Xinclude suport exists.)

Please don't infer from this that I have a negative tone towards lxml; I do not.
I think it's absolutely great.  I have tried pretty much every Python-based
XML/XSLT/Xwhatever code base out there and lxml is really the only one that is
robust enough, reliable enough, and FAST enough to be useful for production use.

I am currently using lxml in conjunction with Mod Python on an Apache web server
to serve XML content data, merging dynamic data through Xincludes and
transforming the output on-the-fly into XHTML using XSLT templates.  It works
great!  If there's one thing I'd like to add to the lxml "wish list" it would be
some more in-depth examples on the web site - there's a lot more things I'd like
to be doing with lxml if I could just figure out if it will do them and how.

-----Original Message-----
From: lxml-dev-bounces at codespeak.net [mailto:lxml-dev-bounces at codespeak.net] On
Behalf Of Martijn Faassen
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 1:00 PM
To: lxml-dev at codespeak.net
Subject: Re: [lxml-dev] About lxml status

Hello,

Lee Brown wrote:
> This discussion reminded me of a question that I've been pondering: 
> will the XPATH support in LXML eventually include support for axes and
predicates?

Could you explain how lxml is lacking in support for axes and predicates?
Possibly you've only been looking at '.find()'. which is the ElementTree
compatible buth limited xpath implementation, and not at the full  '.xpath()'
functionality?

Regards,

Martijn

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