Re: [HACKERS] New XML section for documentation

"Nikolay Samokhvalov" <samokhvalov(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On 8/26/06, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
>> "Valid" and "well-formed" have very specific distinct meanings in XML.
>> (Note that "check" doesn't have any meaning there.) We will eventually
>> want a method to verify both the validity and the well-formedness.
>>
>> I think that a function called xml_valid checks for well-formedness is
>> an outright bug and needs to be fixed.

> That's exactly what I'm talking about. xml_valid() is wrong name and
> it may confuse people.

> Bruce suggested to use overload to keep backward compat. - in other
> words, 1-arg function for checking for well-formedness and 2-arg
> function for validation process. That's bad too:

ISTM the right answer is to add xml_is_well_formed() in this release
and have xml_valid as an alias for it, with documentation explaining
that xml_valid is deprecated and will be removed in the next release.
Then we can add a proper validity-checking function too.

Nikolay submitted a patch later
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-patches/2006-09/msg00123.php
that does part of this and can easily be adapted to add the alias.

His patch also adds an xpath_array() function --- what do people
think about that? It's well past feature freeze ... now we've always
been laxer about contrib than the core code, but still I'm inclined
to say that that function should wait for 8.3.

Comments? It's time to get a move on with resolving this.

regards, tom lane