[PATCH v3 1/6] xmllite: Use empty_element to store various names.

Jeff Smith whydoubt at gmail.com
Mon Nov 4 00:13:03 CST 2019


On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 1:50 PM Nikolay Sivov <nsivov at codeweavers.com> wrote:
> I think this looks good in principle, my suggestion would be to do a
> deeper cleanup first. Especially for 'empty_element' field.
>
> Right now it's used for things that are not elements, with name
> suggesting otherwise. Using 'struct element' for it is also misleading
> for the same reason.

Much of the difficulty seems to be caused by a shortcoming in XML terminology.
Obviously the XML declaration, DTD, and processing instructions are
not elements.
However, they are strikingly similar to an empty element both
practically and visually,
and the xmllite reader method MoveToElement even treats them as such.
Yet, I am not aware of a concise term that encompasses these semantics.

> Maybe we can keep is as is, and use strictly for empty elements, because
> it's used together with element stack. Then we could add another
> structure, without defined type for example as a part of reader struct,
> to hold temporary data for "current" node - strings and position.

This other structure would need to contain the same members as struct element:
the same three strings, the same position, and the same list for
storing attributes.
And we come back to what we call this thing.
"Un-nestable element-like non-element thing" seems a little unwieldy.
But do we really need 2 or 3 or 4 structures and 2 or 3 or 4 instances
for these when
one should suffice, just because XML doesn't have a proper term for
the whole set?



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