Tracy R Reed wrote:
Gabriel Sechan wrote:
XML is overkill. It tries to swat a mosquito with a sledgehammer. It
takes a problem that can generally solved in minutes, and gives you hours
of fun debugging XML code. I have *never* seen a problem solved by XML
that couldn't have been done just as easily- if not more so- without it.
And yet, somehow, nobody ever *did* solve the problems better or more
easily.
SUre we did. How else did anything get written before XML?
Stuff got written but it probably was not as useful due to other
machines not being able to understand it. Look at HTML for example. Only
useful for being rendered for human consumption. You can't take a page
of html from weather.com containing a forecast and feed it into another
program expecting to understand that it is weather data.
Despite HTML's bad example, there have been lots of things around prior
to XML that did a fine job of this. Indeed, HTML is actually built off
of SGML which did a fine job of this so long as you didn't totally
misuse it (HTML violates several tenants of SGML while still being SGML
compliant). There have even been many binary format standards to address
this problem (XDR comes to mind immediately).
And there's damn good reasons for those binary formats- speed of parsing,
storage space, etc. Not being human readable is frequently a bonus too-
for every coder who goes in and hacks something cool of a human readable
file, 20 morons corrupt the file.
Speed of parsing and storage space are worthy tradeoffs for making it
human readable IMHO.
So, here's the thing I never seem to get. Data gets stored in a file
somewhere in some structure that is really not necessarily human
readable. Then someone types in "cat filename" and magically the system
presents this in a human readable format. What's the big deal if instead
I have to type in "my_binary_format_to_readable filename" to get a human
readable format?
--Chris
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