implement serialization

[oli-obk]

deserializing xml is great, but we also need serialization.

[johansja]

Hi. This issue has been opened for more than a year. What is the progress on this? What help might be needed?

[oli-obk]

Unfortunately I have no need for serialization. Therefor I don't think I'm very qualified to make decisions on how to serialize certain things.

I think we could just copy the json Serializers so we get the pretty printing for free and then adjust it to produce xml tags.

There is the big question on how to decide which things go into attributes and which go into inner tags. I don't have a good solution to this problem

[johansja]

Interesting on the last point. Can we have a custom tag for that?

Do you know anyone who might be knowledgeable in this?

[oli-obk]

we could use the #[serde(rename="@foo")] method that I'm using for inner text.

[johansja]

Good. I am just starting in Rust and maybe this will be a good starting point for me too. What do you think?

[oli-obk]

I'm happy for any contributions. If you have any questions, just ask. I'm also available on irc.mozilla.org on #serde

[softprops]

No progress on this yet?

[oli-obk]

Nope, gonna do some serde 0.9 changes first + probably break a lot of code, because the current design is somewhat unfortunate.

[blanham]

@oli-obk What's the current status of this?

[oli-obk]

This entire repository is deprecated in favour of serde-xml-rs which does serialization

[RReverser]

@oli-obk I'm afraid that's not correct, serde-xml-rs currently implements only deserialization. There was some unfinished attempt in a PR, but that's it for now.