[pmwiki-users] xml-PmWiki ?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 02:47:41PM +0100, Pierre-Marie CARETTE wrote:
> each page in PmWiki is a flat file with a PmWiki's code.
> Would be useful to use xml codage for these files ? Why ? Why not ?

I've thought about it a fair bit, and at this stage I don't think
that storing pages in xml would be terribly useful.  First, it would
require that we make use of PHP's xml parser, and I'm not sure that
every PHP installation has an xml parser available.  Second, xml
parsing tends to be somewhat slow.  We'd also have to define a DTD
for it, which just seems a lot of extra work for little extra benefit.

All of the above is assuming that we're simply taking the existing
markup text and wrapping it with xml.  If the intent is to use xml
to represent the actual markup, then we'd have to have an xml->wiki 
markup converter somewhere, and it would make adding markup extensions 
a lot more difficult.

Anyway, I can see that there might be some advantages to using xml
to store pages; other programs might be able to do improved searching
and indexing, for example.  But that's not something that has become
obvious to me.  And saving pages as xml ought to be easy to do --
just create a custom PageStore class that saves and reads pages in
xml instead of ascii text.

> Secondly would be possible , and how, to have a text page with /in  
> XML which appears like a xml page in my browser ?

Sorry, I didn't quite understand this question.

Pm