[Python-Dev] Deprecated xmllib module (original) (raw)

Tony Meyer t-meyer at ihug.co.nz
Tue Dec 7 01:35:16 CET 2004

* The average quality of the library improves as we take out junk (the tzparse module for example) and put in high quality modules like logging, csv, decimal, etc. Yes and no. The added modules have to be relevant to what users want to do. While (relatively) minor stuff like csv and decimal are good ideas, of course, logging is kind of an "insider's" module.

What do you mean by "insiders"? The logging module is great (ok, it could be simpler to use in some cases) for any Python programmer.

What many more users want, however, are things like an XML parser, or a CSS parser, or a usable HTTP server, or...

Statements like this are pretty common, but there's no evidence (that I've ever seen pointed to) that someone has measured how many people want modules for X. People who work with HTML at lot are probably keen on those things you list, yes. OTOH, other people (e.g. me) have no use for any of those, but use CSV and logging daily. Others want something completely different.

There's quite a difference between quality and relevance. It's certainly worthwhile to ensure that all the standard library modules are as of high a quality as possible (e.g. email > rfc822). You'll never be able to get everyone to agree on the same set of modules that are relevant.

If there are that many people that want (e.g.) a CSS parser, wouldn't there be a 3rd party one that everyone is using that could be proposed for addition into the standard library?

=Tony.Meyer

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