Quote:
Originally Posted by Foster
I don't know apalrd, have no idea where apalrd is, etc, etc. Apalrd, humans do not write in XML. Humans should NEVER write any form of a language that looks like XML.
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A language like... HTML? The "language" that the entire web is built on - much of it by hand, or at least with major human interaction?
I'll be the first to agree that the Unix/Linux config file style that you describe is a more human-readable format. Comments are simple (typically a # sign), the options are clear, and the layout is simple. However, XML has a lot of things going for it:
- Parsers are freely available (Xerces, expat, Java's JAXP, and others)
- XML can be validated against a schema to ensure that only valid configurations are specified. Yes, you can do this with a custom parser too, but schema validation is already done and is pretty easy to implement.
- It is human-readable, even if not perfectly so. And there are a lot of good tools to help (Eclipse's XML editor seems pretty cool, although I don't know enough to give an expert opinion on it).