Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes:

> Leo <sdl.web@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On 2010-09-23 00:59 +0100, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>>> FWIW, while I haven't use sml.el much, the little bit I've used it was
>>> not particularly pleasant, partly because of the odd format. I don't
>>> know how/why the xml.el was chosen and how much thought was put into
>>> it, but my experience with it is not 100% positive.
>>
>> That looks like my experience too.
>
> The main differences in the "new" format are (i) listing attributes as
> (:foo bar) inside the element list, rather than in an alist after the
> element name, (ii) listing text as (text "foo") rather than "foo", and
> (iii) the as-yet-unresolved issue with XML namespaces, which probably
> needs to be fixed in xml.c.
>
> Point (i) is a broken design choice, as I already pointed out.  As for
> (ii), it is a little nicer to take the cdr of each list member without
> checking for stringp.  If others thing this is a really good change, I
> won't object, though it seems pretty trivial to me.  We can add an
> optional flag to the xml-* functions to toggle between the two
> representations.

This patch fixes all the problems above and gives SXML conforming
representation of the elements tree.

Obviously we would need to patch `xml.el', and provide an interface for
accessing tree elements.

Thanks,
Wojciech