> Which of the following XML representations is better? If you assert
> that one is better than another, please explain – in simple, concrete
> terms – why it is better?
There is rarely a single best answer in the absence of any sort of
information about use cases. Given that all printf format specifications
start with ‘%’ and ‘.’ is always the precision delimiter, I don’t think
you gain anything from having them in the markup *and* it introduces the
possibility of errors. (If you put ‘#’ in the start_of_specifier
element, what does that mean?)
One unanswered question in your examples is whether you intend to mark
multiple flags up separately or as a group:
<flag>+</flag>
<flag>0</flag>
or
<flag>+0</flag>
General guidelines: avoid ambiguity and avoid including text that can be
generated. Those are the right answers except in circumstances where
they aren’t, natch.
Be seeing you,
norm
--
Norman Tovey-Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
https://nwalsh.com/
> Any sufficiently undocumented code is indistinguishable from magic.
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