XML

[Ben Finney]

On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 20:49:16 +0400 (MSD), Roman Suzi wrote:
> OK. When I was talking about plain text, I had in mind that it has
> some proprietary format. For example, I can easily write:
> 
> ------------------
> foo = "123"
> bar = "456"
> zoo = "la\"lala"
> ------------------
> 
> And it's not very hard to parse that. 
> In case of XML I will need something like
> 
><?xml version="1.0"?>
><foo>123</foo><bar>456</bar><zoo>la"lala</zoo>

This, then, is a poor choice for XML.  Where XML has the advantage over
flat ASCII text, is when the structure is more complex, especially if
it's hierarchical (which a heck of a lot of data is).  Then a flat ASCII
file is too difficult for a human to parse *anyway*, so you might as
well take advantage of XML and still have all the advantages of having
the data readable in some form.

Bleh, that reads terribly.  Hope I get the point across -- XML formats
don't give any particular advantage over simple, record-based flat ASCII
data; they do give advantage once the structure needs to become more
complex.

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