"Garrett D'Amore" <garrett_damore@tadpole.com> writes:

> Again, I'm not beholden to XML, but I _abhor_ the idea of creating
> another one-off, non-extensible special purpose file format.

XML makes me grumpy because it "solves" the problem of low-level
syntax but doesn't help at all with the higher-level semantics. As far
as I'm concerned, saying that XML makes for a uniform file format is
about the same as saying that ASCII makes for a uniform file format
(but with more complexity).

If you're limiting the XML to some kind of key-value dictionary, you
still don't know the legal sets of keys and values, and you get into
trouble when you want more grouped data; if you aren't so limited, you
have an entire hierarchy to explain, with an awful lot of visual
clutter (I don't like that XML forces everything into a tree
representation. Not everything wants to be a tree).

XML documents need a DTD to be interesting; given the possible
complexity of a DTD, this is kind of like saying that a config file
needs a parser to be interesting. You haven't helped anything by
moving the problem down into a thicket of angle brackets.

        - Nathan