Re: contemporary XML parsing in JavaScript

On Thu, 2022-12-01 at 16:25 -0500, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> 
> "fast-XML-parser NPM package has more downloads/week (6 million) than
> Vue (3.4 million) or Angular (3 million)."

Good fined!


It might also suggest they do a lot of bug fixes, since node checks
often for new revisions. Or that there was a mistake that caused the
package to be downloaded every time node.js was started. Or that it's
fairly widely used :)

Checking
https://snyk.io/advisor/npm-package/fast-xml-parser
i see that 658 other projects depend on it. Also, i do notice a spike
of downloads after each release, but it's small compared to the total,
so that's not a major factor.

React.js gets nearly 17 million downloads per week, though, accordingto
that page, and xml-js gets over 14.

It's not a validating parser; the documentation says "DOCTYPE entities
are supported" and also "unpaired tags (Eg <br> in HTML), stop nodes
(Eg <script> in HTML) are supported"
See https://github.com/NaturalIntelligence/fast-xml-parser


The "validator" has an option, "allowBooleanAttributes" but doesn't
seem to have any reference to a DTD or external document type
definition: it's checking well-formedness:

   const xmlData = `<parent><extra></parent>`;
   const result = XMLValidator.validate( xmlData, {
     unpairedTags: ["extra"]
   });
   
Being able to "validate" this as XML is a violation of the XML
specification, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.

The parser does not allow entity replacement text to contain &, and
also goes wrong (silently returns an incorrect result as XML) if there
is an unescaped & in the input.

So, it's moderately popular, widely used, a little buggy...
interestingly, it has some HTML entities built in such as &inr; for
Indian Rupee but not egrave etc.

It looks like they are actively working to improve it, and are aware
of, and admit to, its limitations, which is excellent.

liam

-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org

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