TC wrote:
> XML is a data-format that can be very easily ported across platforms. 

Not really even that.

> worry whether your INT has 16, 32 or 64 bits (and so on) 

You always have to worry about that. It's just a question of whether your 
encoding tells you that or not.

> t is human-readable in theory; in practise you need an 
> editor to do anything complex. 

In practice, all this means is that people have stopped bothering to 
document data formats. I can't tell you the number of times I've said "can 
you send me the scema?" and they answer "We can send you some examples."

> Still - a config-file in xml is much more 
> easily edited than one in a custom binary-format.

There are better formats for that, too. You're talking about the benefits of 
small files intended to be edited by hand being encoded in ASCII, rather 
than the benefits of XML per se.

> Raw XML-coded data makes for very large files, which >was< an issue 10 years 
> ago. 

It still is. We don't use XML for Call Data Records, 1032 records (the 
records bank transactions and ATMs use), or SNMP or syslog.  You don't want 
to be transporting XML over SMS messages to make your program work.

> IF Microsoft would have had better support of XML and XSLT (which is a 
> stylesheet language for XML and in XML) in their early browser versions, 

I'm pretty sure IE5 predated XSLT.

In any case, that's *markup*. That's what it's for.

My opinion is that if you have more text between < and > than you
do between > and < then you're clearly using the wrong tool. Try ASN.1 or 
something, which has a readable version isomorphic to a very space-efficient 
binary version which is isomorphic to the speed-efficient binary version. Or 
at least JSON or INI or some such.

The whole crap of "human readable" is bogus. None of it is human readable. 
You at least need a text editor. Given that, you could probably write VI and 
emacs macros to edit binary ASN.1 formats as text, just like you do brace 
matching nowadays.

The only real advantage of using it for data is that every language in the 
world has support for at least primitive XML parsing, so it's easy to 
serialize a tree of text.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Yes, we're traveling togeher,
   but to different destinations.

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