Re: Simple XHTML (XML) parser/printer

[Miles Bader <miles@...>]

Tuomo Valkonen <tuomov@iki.fi> writes:
> I've never liked XML for anything, thanks to its its horrible syntax. 
> It's not good for software processing, which would far more efficiently 
> handle a binary format, and it's not good for humans, being over-verbose.

I don't like XML much either, but I think for "save files" (not usually
read/written by humans), the result move to a humanly readable format
with a somewhat standardized tree-oriented structure is a _huge_
improvement over the random crappy binary formats that generally
preceded it.

I'm all too often in the position where I want to reverse-engineer some
undocumented/proprietary file-format, but really don't wanna spend a
huge amount of effort on it, and xml-based formats generally seem to
make this task much more tractable than the Bad Old Days...

There are some extreme cases where huge file size or whatever make a
binary format better, but I don't think that's the case for most
applications.

-Miles

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