

Re: [OT] XML

XML is nice for internal config, message/config exchanges, etc... help with its structure and its DTD to force/help understanding the schema.

BUT definitely not useable by an end user for end-user config. It is very hard to read (opening an XML with vi is a ass). Not everybody is using a Desktop with editors etc...

Plain text is readeable by non-IT people, quick to read and update.

Manually updating XML can be a pain when modifying its structure and hard to repair, even with tools (not always explicit on exact error position).

2012/11/26 Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org>
* Ivan Shmakov <oneingray@gmail.com>, 2012-11-26, 14:32:

Seriously, XML takes a lot of concerns off an application programmer. It provides quoting, arbitrary hierarchical structure, support for different encodings, etc. Why, don't you think that $ grep '[[:lower:]]' FILE is ever supposed to work? For surely it isn't: grep has no way to know the encoding of the input file, and relies on the locale instead. On the contrary, XML allows for the encoding to be specified explicitly via a processing instruction. And then, there's XPath, which takes the input dataset structure into account.

How do you search for a lowercase letter in XPath?

Jakub Wilk

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