Date: Dec. 9, 2001
Link: http://oreilly.com/catalog/pythonxml/chapter/ch01.html
Source Author or Organization: Christopher A. Jones, Fred L. Drake Jr., O'Reilly & Associates

This is a chapter excerpted from the O'Reilly & Associates book Python & XML by Fred L. Drake, Jr. and Christopher A. Jones.

The chapter begins pointing out the main strengths of pairing XML with Python and the effectiveness of the combination in a distributed environment. A brief introduction of XML follows, stressing main advantages of the language such as platform and application neutrality, key specifications, international language support and hierarchical structure.

The Python language is overviewed with an emphasis on features that enhance a union with XML, including the ease of trying out code fragments with an interactive interpreter, robust portability, object orientation and the contribution of significant whitespace to the ease with which humans can read the code. A comparison of the Python standard library, PyXML and Fourthought's 4Suite (the three main Python XML tools) is next.

The chapter ends with an examination of Python's available methods for extracting information, with a look at Document Object Model (DOM) APIs, Simple Application Programming Interface for XML (SAX) APIs, XML Path Language (XPath) and Extensible Style Language Transformations (XSLT).