What is "sxml"

SXML is an alternative syntax for writing XML data (more precisely, XML Infosets) as S-expressions, to facilitate working with XML data in Lisp and Scheme. An associated suite of tools implements XPath, SAX and XSLT for SXML in Scheme and are available in the GNU Guile implementation of that language.

Textual correspondence between SXML and XML for a sample XML snippet is shown below:

XML

SXML

<tag attr1="value1" attr2="value2"> <nested>Text node</nested> <empty/> </tag> (tag (@ (attr1 "value1") (attr2 "value2")) (nested "Text node") (empty))

Compared to other alternative representations for XML and its associated languages, SXML has the benefit of being directly parsable by existing Scheme implementations. The associated tools and documentation were praised in many respects by David Mertz in his IBM developerWorks column, though he also criticized the preliminary nature of its documentation and system.