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