[Docutils-develop] Design - XML DOM?

While working my way towards understanding the internals of reStructured 
Text well enough to write directives, I've had some questions about the 
implementation decisions.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this is an attack or criticism of anyone, I'm just 
curious and working to understand it myself.

I'm going to put each question in it's own email, in case they spawn any 
discussion.

That aside, here's Dethe's Design Question #1:

reStructuredText appears to create it's own XML DOM-like internal 
structures and tools, and can be serialized as XML or XHTML.  Given all 
that, why not use one of the many XML DOMs that already exist for Python 
(at least one is distributed with the main Python distro) rather than 
recreating the wheel?  This would simplify the code base and allow reST to 
work with other tools such as XPath and XSLT.

--Dethe

--
"Melting down holy grails to make silver bullets for my .357 Panacea"
Dethe Elza (de...@bu...)
Chief Mad Scientist
Enfolding Systems (http://enfoldingsystems.com)
Weblog: http://livingcode.ca/