Simon Willison’s Weblog

XML highlights for PHP 5

20th December 2003

XML in PHP5: An in-depth look into advanced XML features (via Keith) does exactly what it says on the tin. Here are the bits that caught my eye:

• HTML Support in ext/xml—PHP 5 can load in not well-formed HTML documents and create a DOM tree from them.
• XPath support—and it works with HTML loaded via the above.
• XML Validation, including support for RelaxNG! I wonder if they’ll support compact syntax.
• Extending DOM Classes—this is really cool, and demonstrates how much more mature PHP 5’s OOP support is.

Unforuntately, my biggest criticism of PHP remains: all of the above is supported using functions built in to the default namespace! The lack of a smart namespace system (like Python’s modules) really gets in the way when you start trying to write reusable code or large applications.