Hi Snowballers, (I sent a message to this list a while ago about this but the thread died.) Oleg Kiselyov has written an excellent XML parsing system for Scheme, and it's been ported to a number of interpreters -- in fact, pretty much every interpreter that Snow currently supports (with the exception, maybe, of STklos). I think it'd be really useful to have some XML parsing packages included in Snow, and SSAX is pretty ubiquitous in the Scheme world. When I brought it up on this list a few months ago, Marc Feeley suggested that I get in touch with Oleg and ask him what his preferences are for porting. His response was:
"I guess more like `hands off'... I try to keep the core SSAX relatively portable. [...] It's up to the developers of a particular Scheme system and its community to decide how to treat SSAX."
Perhaps it might be useful to contact the maintainers of the various ports. They are, as nearly as I can figure out:
* Dmitry Lizorkin (dmitry.lizorkin@gmail.com) - Bigloo; Chicken; Gambit; PLT/MzScheme * Shiro Kawai (shiro@lava.net) - Gauche * Andy Wingo (wingo@pobox.com) - Guile * Mike Sperber (sperber@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de) - SCSH; Scheme48
If these maintainers want to participate, that'd be great -- but I recently took a look at some of the different ports with the intent to make the Snowball myself, and they're all pretty divergent in terms of the exports they provide and how the code is organized. The problem, I think, is that SSAX is not just an XML parser, it's a collection of functions for making parsers and reading text, and different distributions have made different decisions as to how to present the parsing system to the user. It's not clear to me how to proceed, but I'd love to discuss this further...
Regards, Julian