[JDEV] XML part of jabberd

[Vitaly Ostanin]

Hello, All!

I write jabber documentation in Russian, using DocBook/XML. I 
have already written XSLT-styles for working on XML-configuration 
of a jabber-server (and any XML-file :)). These styles create a 
description templates in a separate DocBook/XML files for each tags.

I have following issues:

1.
Some of the tags are being used for different purposes, though 
they have the same name.
E.g., the tag <allow> describes admissible conditions and 
filtering actions, but the very same tag <allow> contains 
admissible ip-addresses. I beg your pardon, but it seems to me 
that it is a wrong way to use th XML structure - one tag should 
stand for one semantic unit only. Otherwise it becomes quite 
difficult to describe full paths to a tag :(

2.
The configuration file (IMHO) doesn't have an appropriate 
syntaxis: the tag <jabberd:cmdline> doesn't contain description 
of XML namespaces 'jabberd'.

I know that in v.1.5 the structure of the configuration will be
quite different. Can or may I have a look at least at sketches of 
the new structure?

It would be more comfortable to use all features of a technology 
by its further development.

E.g. using XML Schema for determination structure of the 
configuration file. There isn't even a DTD usage at the moment, 
though it's more about SGML than XML.

We could also use XML Inclusions (XInclude) for including parts 
of configuration into basic configuration file.

Well, this is why I wonder, what XML-parser is in use for 
jabberd, and why it is. There are parts of expat code in the 
source code of jabberd. So is it worth to get linked to a 
concrete parser? Maybe we could work out a universal API for 
connection to other XML parsers?

E.g. libxml2 is the most appropriate to XML standards tool, where
UTF-8 is being used inside - just like in jabber. libxml2 has
MIT-license - just like expat has.

I clearly understand that the issued problems are pretty much 
global, so I would appreciate an answer covering at least part of 
them.

Thank you.

PS Special thanks to Alexandre Prokoudine for translation my 
things in English :)

-- 
Regards, Vyt
mailto:  vyt at vzljot.ru
JID:     vyt at vzljot.ru