Unresolved Issues with libxml2

[Doug Simons]

Hello,

Since we've submitted the new implementation of the NSXML... classes based on 
libxml2 and people are beginning to use them, I thought I would mention some 
remaining unresolved issues in the hope that other people might have more 
experience with the libxml2 libraries and have some ideas about how to solve 
them. These are currently the top issues on my list:

1. Parsing an XML document generates text nodes in the tree for whitespace 
between elements even when the XML_PARSE_NOBLANKS option is given.  Cocoa 
doesn't do this.

2. Find a way to control formatting of "empty" nodes. Cocoa has the options 
NSXMLNodeExpandEmptyElement and NSXMLNodeCompactEmptyElement to control whether 
an empty node foo is displayed as "<foo></foo>" or as "<foo/>" . Currently our 
libxml2 implementation will only display the latter.

3. Find a way to control "pretty-print" formatting. Cocoa has an option 
NSXMLNodePrettyPrint to control whether a string representation of a tree will 
include indentation for enhanced readability or not. Currently our libxml2 
implementation always includes indentation.

I have searched the libxml2 documentation for ways to control these issues but 
haven't come up with anything that works (in particular I tried the 
xmlKeepBlanksDefault() function for issue 1 without any success).

I welcome any ideas or suggestions.

Thanks,

Doug