IntroductionIntroductionThis programmers manual describes Mini-XML version 2.3, a small XML parsing library that you can use to read and write XML data files in your C and C++ applications.
Mini-XML was initially developed for the Gutenprint project to replace the rather large and unwieldy libxml2 library with something substantially smaller and easier-to-use. It all began one morning in June of 2003 when Robert posted the following sentence to the developer's list:
It's bad enough that we require libxml2, but rolling our own XML parser is a bit more than we can handle.
I then replied with:
Given the limited scope of what you use in XML, it should be trivial to code a mini-XML API in a few hundred lines of code.
I took my own challenge and coded furiously for two days to produced the initial public release of Mini-XML, total lines of code: 696. Robert promptly integrated Mini-XML into Gutenprint and removed libxml2.
Thanks to lots of feedback and support from various developers, Mini-XML has evolved since then to provide a more complete XML implementation and now stands at a whopping 3,441 lines of code, compared to 103,893 lines of code for libxml2 version 2.6.9.
Aside from Gutenprint, Mini-XML is used for the following projects/software applications:
Please email me (mxml @ easysw . com) if you would like your project added or removed from this list, or if you have any comments/quotes you would like me to publish about your experiences with Mini-XML.