On Friday, 27 November 2015 at 19:42:43 UTC, Chris wrote:
At the end of the day, all markup, data exchange or description languages are not easy on the eye. It's a question of "which is worse", and that's often a question of personal taste.
Yes, syntax is rather personal! Some GNU people want Lisp as the universal config format + scripting language (guile)... I understand their motivation and reasoning, but I don't want it... 8-)
But technical merits and tooling is a more objective criteria, and right now XML and all the associated standards provides best interop, ability to describe the content to non DUB tools on a meta level, transforms, queries, etc.
I'm sure that we would have a similar discussion, if we had YAML, XML, TOML or whatever. It doesn't really matter. But what does matter is that we use a well known standardized format.
Just define a canonical XML format for advanced use, which is used internally and for interchange, then provide the common stuff as easy-to-read YAML / JSON. That way 90% can use the easy version, and all advanced or experimental shoot-yourself-in-the-foot functionality is hidden from newbies.
The DUB tooling would just generate the XML from the newbie format.
One can have it both ways. :)
