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On Monday, May 5, 2003, at 10:50 US/Central, Mike Kozlowski wrote:
> That's precisely what I don't want to do. The best thing about XML
> configuration files is that I already know the syntax -- I don't need
> to
> remember whether it's #, //, or ; that marks a comment, whether I need
> a
> special character at the end of every line, what character I use to
> quote
> strings, how I do escaping, or anything. With XML files, the syntax is
> standard and universal.
Agreed, but I think you're missing another huge benefit: the syntax is
not only well-known but _complete_ and _correct_. When people invent
their own file formats, they tend to omit details like escaping stuff.
XML has well-known ways of doing this.
For example, look at Adium's log files. (Adium is a great IM program
for OS X.) It's a really simple format: timestamp, sender, message,
newline. I.e.:
(HH:MM:SS)sender:message
But there's no escaping done on the message. So what happens when you
paste Adium logs into an Adium window? Well, the new logfile is
ambiguous. There's no good way to distinguish this from each of those
messages being sent. You can guess based on the timestamp and sender,
but that's silly.
XML has solved this problem: the escaping is well-known. Not only that,
but SAX serializers do the escaping for you easily just by using
ContentHandler.characters(). XSLT correctly handles escaping whether
you put stuff as content or attributes, which places it in the minority
of template formats. This is a better way of doing things: when you
have to manually escape stuff, you will eventually forget. These do
things correctly by default. You'd have to work to screw it up.
Anyway, this discussion is kind of silly. I don't think many people on
this list have to be sold on XML.
Scott
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