FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: openbeos Digest V3 #121

[Ingo Weinhold <bonefish@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, Jeremy Friesner wrote:

> François wrote:
>
> > XML easy to read ??? LOL
> >
> > Well, whatever.
>
> It actually is, compared to many alternatives (e.g. HTML, flattened
> BMessage binary files, text files whose proprietary parser nobody
> can remember the syntax rules for, etc).  And of course by easy to
> read I mean easy for software to read, as well as human beings.

IIRC this discussion started about a format for preferences. The question
that comes to my mind is: Why shall those files be human readable? I
suspect, because they shall be hand-editable. Ignoring that I don't see,
why that would be necessary, XML is certainly a quite user-unfriendly
format for editing by hand. Arguments can be found here:
 http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-sbxml.html?dwzone=xml

I would favor a format like the one François mentioned. Even better would
be something compatible to the driver settings format. E.g. an extension
by optional type annotations. If the type is omitted, `string' is implied.
If given, a basic parser (e.g. in the kernel or boot loader) may
nevertheless ignore the typing info, interpreting everything as strings.
This would allow a certain level of interchangability between BMessages
and driver settings strings. In particular for sending messages from the
kernel to userland this format might be used.

CU, Ingo