Re: [Tcllib-devel] XML generation

[Lars H. <Lar...@re...>]

Andreas Kupries skrev:
> Lars Hellström wrote:
>> Lately, a lot of the projects I've been working on have involved (i) 
>> generating Tcl data structures that could be viewed as a particular 
>> encoding of part of an XML document and (ii) converting said data 
>> structures to XML on output.
[snip]
>> The latest version of my command is TDLtoXML::xml_from_trees (but 
>> never mind the namespace) on http://wiki.tcl.tk/25681#pagetocbc2b8a8c. 
>> This coverts from a tdom list format to XML (cf. 
>> http://wiki.tcl.tk/26156), and that is perhaps something that should 
>> be scrutinised, since putting something like this in tcllib is an act 
>> of blessing its data format.

Note that TDL is just one of the projects where XML generation pops up. 
One could envision a package for both TDL and XML, but it's not 
something I'm suggesting here and now.

> "The trick is to parse TDL data by evaluating it in an empty slave 
> interpreter."
> 
> Are you limited to Tcl 8.4 ? If not, i.e. 8.5 is viable, then usage of
> a namespace and 'namespace unknown' may allow us to forego the empty slave.

No, for security reasons that wouldn't be good; you can always give a 
fully qualified named even from within a given namespace.

> What I am missing is some explanation on how you envision the dnyamic 
> creation of TDL structures. Plain [list] commands ? Right now I only see 
> static structures on the page, and their conversion to other formats 
> (data tress, pretty printing, ...)

For dynamic generation, you might instead want to look at Part III of 
http://abel.math.umu.se/~lars/mtmtcl/interfaces.pdf (page 79 and 
forth); that's one of the other projects. In yet another project, I've 
been generating SVG for inlining into XHTML...

> Having read this I now also see that the _xml.tcl I mentioned in my 
> first mail is more of a low level generator which would be driven by 
> such data structures. Assembler in essence, versus your HLL.

I'll have to take a look at it. Must rush now.

> The xmlgen/htmlgen refeenced on your pages are much more comparable to 
> the _xml.tcl

Lars Hellström