Re: DOMXML support should be added to PHP5

jasbarne@indiana.edu (Jason Barnett) wrote in news:20040724003530.27087.qmail@pb1.pair.com: > Well you are right that if > you used the old DOMXML functions in PHP4 that there is no clean way > to move that code forward without rewriting / supporting two > infrastructures. I'm not a core developer but my guess is that they > didn't mind dropping the support completely because in PHP4 it was all > tagged as "experimental". Looking at the two approaches, I preferred using DOMXML and as it was based on libxml2 & libxslt it seemed to be the better option. Clearly I've learn't my lesson never to use anything tagged as experimental again unless I'm highly competent with that language and if necessary, be willing and able to code everything myself. > It's unfortunate for you, but I think making the change now makes > sense because of the new DOM / SimpleXML support. To a 'certain' extent the timing of the change is out of my hands as, like the majority of users, my website is hosted on a shared web server whose settings are out of my control. > Perhaps another solution: create a class and call it DomDocument4_3_8 > or something that mimics the method calls / properties of the new > DomDocument class. Contact me off list if you need help with this. Thanks for your offer of help. Due to my current level of familiarity with PHP, the option best suited to me is the second workaround I mentioned in my earlier post i.e. to create PHP5 DOM versions of my scripts and a PHP version checking script that also then runs either my PHP4 DOMXML or PHP5 DOM scripts. In order to learn PHP5's DOM function and develop replacement scripts, I'll have to find out how I can run both PHP4 & 5 interpreters with Apache on my PC. I have some ideas about how I can manage that ;-) I don't have a broad knowledge of PHP yet. Up until now I narrowly focused on only what I needed to learn to be able to build something specific. That helped me to build a basic website templating system using XSLT but the vulnerabilities of that narrow approach are now all too obvious. I hope in the future that other relatively inexperienced PHP users don't have to face this same situation. In the future a transitional approach in PHP to replacing any function should be implemented. IMO, that is part of good project/life-cycle management. My hope for the future is that PHP remains accessible and attractive to new users. It could be all too easy for the core PHP 'guru' developers to become blase about this aspect of the language. Cheers, Scrumpy :)