Re: Linking Emacs with libxml2

[Chad Brown <yandros@MIT.EDU>]

On Sep 6, 2010, at 11:44 AM, Lennart Borgman wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 5:21 PM, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
>> Apparently libxml2 comes with a parser for "real world" HTML, which is
>> very intriguing:
>> 
>> http://www.xmlsoft.org/html/libxml-HTMLparser.html
>> 
>> If Emacs provided a native interface to this function, we could say
>> 
>> (parse-html "file.html")
>> => (:html (:head ...) (:body ...))
>> 
>> and get a nice parse tree out very fast.  (Parsing HTML from Emacs Lisp
>> is rather slow.)
>> 
>> Has this been discussed before and rejected?  It seems like an obvious
>> idea, and would enable both easier extraction of data from HTML files,
>> as well as writing a (simple) HTML renderer in Emacs Lisp.
> 
> It was discussed before here:
> 
>  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-06/msg01147.html
> 
> Wasn't there a problem with linking to external libraries at that time?

Yes, there was.  The FSF [lawyers] recently determined that it would be 
possible to use external libraries with some explicit marking of legal status, 
along the lines of what is used in GCC.  Looking back through the mail 
archives, it seems that practical implementation is stuck waiting on an FFI 
design/implementation.  I thought that one had been sketched out, but I'm 
not finding it in the archives, so perhaps I am confused.   

*Chad