Le 23/02/2012 20:06, Warp nous fit lire :
>   It's verbose, but it has one advantage over most other formats: It's
> standardized and pretty well supported.
> 

Well, XML is a container. The problem is lack of intelligent design for
the inside. It is too often the Excel sheet of today: A bunch of
entries, without consistency.

Indeed, with a bit of base64 encapsulation, you could put an BINARY
excel sheet file into a XML document. And advertise that you output XML.

And to make matter more interesting, some find it enterprisey to have
xml inside xml... and other old CSV into XML too (without reinterpreting
the data, so it's just a formatting. A dumb formatting).



>   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).

Read it, yes. Understand it, that's another whole story!
Same as: I can read latin or japanese in katakana, with few error on
sound. That does not means I get the meaning. At least I can edit it
like a monkey.

>   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.

XML is interesting when exchanging documents/data, once the big bosses
and their technical staffs have agreed on a XSD. But whenever you add a
third company, you need to negociate another XSD (with a totally
different approach of the data, not even compatible with the first one).

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