Charles Woerner wrote:
...

> 
> Standardizing an API such as DOM across different languages is a nice
> goal.  When I see a few lines of XML traversing code written in Ruby
> using DOM I immediately know what it's doing despite the fact that I've
> never coded a line of Ruby in my life.  

But XML manipulation in Ruby will more than likely be done using REXML, 
Ruby's bundled XML parser.  It has a Ruby-centric API.

When the idea of having Ruby support XML "out of the box" first came up 
a few years ago, the discussion centered on two views: Should Ruby 
support the W3C DOM, requiring Rubyists to use a decidedly non-Ruby API 
for XML tasks, or should a bundled parser have an API that would be 
intuitive to reasonably experienced Ruby hacker?

The latter point of view won, and Ruby ships with REXML.

One *can* use libxml2 with Ruby, but I suspect this is selected over 
REXML only when speed or memory are issues.  For most day-to-day XML 
handling, I think people are choosing the API that best meshes with the 
language.


James Britt