News You Can Bruise for 2005 March 30

It's now in Debian! How 'bout that.

Apropos all the buzz detailed in the previous entries, Sumana said the problem with Beautiful Soup is that you can't tell what it does by looking at the name. This is true, but I'd say it's true of a majority of software packages. It's at its worst in commercial software where your package name is a product name and needs to be trademarkable. It's not as bad in free clones of commercial proprietary software, where they can't use the trademarkable name so they take a word describing the software and hack "K" or "G" or "GNU" into it. But I think those names are pretty bad and unimaginative. That may be my bias towards wacky names that stick in your head but (though usually trademarkable) would never make it past a marketing department.

Maybe software packages need subtitles, the way every nonfiction book nowadays has a subtitle that explains the catchy main title in way too much detail. "Beautiful Soup: The Hidden History Of The Python *ML Parser That Handles Bad Input And Provides Tree Traversal Methods".

Okay, I've got the new Beautiful Soup running an extremely sensible parsing algorithm based (more or less) on the difference between block tags and inline tags. I gave it a pretty-print mode so I could eyeball the parse tree, and it looks good everywhere I've tried it. Major features I still have to implement:

• Make fetch() capable of searching for text, not just tags.
• Add the nextSibling and prevSibling members for tags that have siblings on the same level of the parse tree.