[webkit-dev] Writing a new XML parser with no external libraries

[Rob Buis]

On 29 June 2011 01:10, Dirk Schulze <krit at webkit.org> wrote:
>
> Am 29.06.2011 um 05:42 schrieb TAMURA, Kent:
>
>> I'm a little negative of developing a new XML parser. I'm afraid that the new parser introduces a lot of security/stability problems which existing parsers already resolved.
>
> I feel the same. Writing a new parser from scratch means introducing a lot of new security bugs, parsing errors and maybe bigger performance lost at the beginning. Speaking from the SVG side, we fail at least three tests on the W3C SVG Test Suite because of parsing bugs if libxml2 on MacOS. All of these bugs are fixed in later versions of libxml2. Updating libxml2 more often on MacOS would help a lot.

Specifically these test failures are due to a bug with internal
entities in libxml2 which was first seen with OS X 10.5.8, so before
that it worked. Maybe a new libxml2 version is used in Lion and will
fix it, but should a new XML parser come about entities are an area
that should work even though little SVG files out there actually seem
to use it in practice.
Cheers,

Rob.