> Edward Wildgoose wrote: > > > > <source> > > <name>hotbird</name> > > <type>sat</sat> > > <diseqc_protocol>1.0</diseqc_protocol> > > <lnb>1</lnb> > > <card>1</card> > > </source> > > That nicely outlines the reason why many people don't like XML: > It's hard to find the interesting information between all those tags. > And to add insult to injury the tag names appear twice for every > little piece of information. Emards proposal looked much nicer, > but...
Yes, I completely agree. And it's very verbose (but compresses well!) However, I think that you can also use Attribute syntax to make it look like "a=27" type stuff again? I guess it comes down to whether you want to look at it completely unformatted in an email, or whether you will be using an editor. Many editors, and even many web browsers will make it nice and easy to read, and even allow you to expand and close sections. This perhaps makes up for the slightly unwieldy look A lot comes down to whether *you* will be reading it or the computer. Take the VDR format for example, this certainly isn't too readable, but most people are quite happy with it (well, *I* think it's adequate) > I would prefer a relational model. Depends exactly what you mean. None of the ideas I suggested are properly relational, but I guess the hierarchical view is somewhat relational, at least to the extent that the data is not many to one. Notice for example how the programs "relate" to the mux and the mux to the source. However, we receive an extract of a relational database via an XML feed, and whilst it certainly does work quite nicely, it feels pretty cludgy because we have many to many relationships to model, and so we end up with multiple XML files to avoid repeating data. XML does downward hierarchies very well though in general. I personally don't think XML is particularly revolutionary. At it's simplest its just saying "Look heres a nice generic hierarchical file format, with a defined way to start and end attributes definitions". There are loads of ways of doing this, and I think people waste a lot of time discussing whether XML looks as pretty as some of the other ways. The good thing is that it's fairly standard and so there are loads of tools available to fiddle with it. The bad thing is that XML is pretty verbose and could read a little bit better ...Tough call.... As someone else said though - lets see the colour of your code...! -- Info: To unsubscribe send a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe linux-dvb" as subject.
