oh, and while it's on my mind...

[hyuri]

why does everyone insist on changing alllll of their config files over to XML, despite the fact that a) it takes (much) time to implement the change in the source; b) it's often harder to find a specific config element to change (manually) amongst all the added XML noise; and c) in many cases it vastly increases the size of the config files in question? I mean, looking at some of the files I'm pretty sure that C is often due to bad implementation, but what about the other two? what brought this to mind was the following:

bash-2.05b$ ls -l .xfce/xfce?rc
-rw-r--r--    1 hyuri    users        3734 Aug  1 22:20 .xfce/xfce3rc
-rw-r--r--    1 hyuri    users        7671 Aug  1 22:20 .xfce/xfce4rc

the files are friggin' identical except that one is XML!

Comments

[soltice.livejournal.com]

I wondered this myself for quite awhile when I was starting my second attempt at a game engine. My first one used \n delimited files in a costom format, the second one eventually landed to XML.

Why?

Given that most XML reading software would use EXPAT or some other prepackaged file reader, development time is cut significantly. You don't need to come up with a new format, and not spend the money or time implementing one.

XML also scales really, really, really well. A simpler config language might become unwieldly in a few versions. A simple feature addition might lead to a complete rewrite of the file parser. The file parser becomes really diffcult to manage and to debug. Time is wasted, money is wasted.

XML also has a predefined system of rules that let you know what it's capable of up front. Design errors are more easily avoided.

Plus there's one more benefit. Multiple applications can be more easily made to support your file format if ever needed. In "cooperative" applications like graphics and 3D applications, this is really a plus.

The problem is, that most people *don't* know how to write an efficent schema. XML RPC, I think, is a particularly bad implementation of XML. It's overgrown with excess tags and redunant nesting that is really just an annoyence.

[hyuri.livejournal.com]

ah, an explanation that makes sense! thanks muchly.