nemesis <nam### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> The trouble with the whole xml thing is that it's just another 
> enterprisey BS to grind CPUs idle times.  You need an xml document, an 
> xml document describing the structure of the previous document, yet 
> another xml document to describe how to style the original document 
> itens, perhaps a xml document describing how to transform your xml 
> document into another xml document.  It's an insanely verbose and 
> homogeneous pile of human and machine barely readable crap.

  It's verbose, but it has one advantage over most other formats: It's
standardized and pretty well supported.

  It has many advantages over many other formats. One example is character
encoding. With all types of character encodings out there, and support
for them in different file formats and programs being what they are, a
*standardized* form for representing special characters can be really
useful. Also, any program that reads XML ought to support it regardless
of which character encoding it uses (at least if the program uses a
generic XML parser internally).

  Compare this to, for example, just a simple raw .txt file. Which encoding
does it use? ISO-Latin-1? ISO-Latin-9? UTF-8? Shift JIS? EUC-JP? ISO-2022-JP?
Something else completely? Impossible to say. With an XML file you don't have
to care. (As said, if your program uses a generic XML parser, the character
encoding used in the input XML file becomes a non-issue.)

  Not that this exact same thing wouldn't be possible with a less verbose
format, but as said, XML is widely supported so it has this implicit
advantages over many other formats.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message