[bzrweb PATCH] look up repository descriptions in a config file

[Sean Russell]

On Friday 20 May 2005 01:30, Lalo Martins wrote:
> > <treedescription>
> >   <title>bazaar-ng</title>
> >   <shortdescription>...</shortdescription>
> >   <author>..</author>
> > </treedescription>
> >
> > It's easy to recurse off into XML schema madness though; keeping it
> > simple is definitely good.
>
> I passionately hate the (ab)use of XML for human-computer interaction.
> XML was designed for computer-computer and it's the only thing it's good
> for.  (But then it's *very* good.)  Let's not go the crackpot way of
...
> For parseability, I'd stick to configparser, which is much more
> human-friendly.  Also, configparser allows both ini format (foo=bar) and
> rfc822 format (foo: bar) interchangeably.

The provided example is an excellent reason why XML should be considered for 
this.  I can easily imagine, six months from now, a proposal to add more 
information to the <author> section:

  <treedescription>
    ...
    <author>
      <email>...</email>
      <web>...</web>
    </author>
  </treedescription>

Using XML will guarantee extensibility, and provides the ability to store 
hierarchical structure.  There are XML parsers for *every* language, and many 
languages come with one; there are well-understood transformation tools; and, 
last but not least, most web browsers/filesystem browsers understand it and 
some can auto-magically apply CSS stylesheets to them.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think that XML is the perfect document markup.  
Namespaces are a bane, it is heavy, not as easy to parse as they wanted, and 
many people designing XML documents have no clue about designing data 
structures.  But I believe the benefits here outweigh the flaws.

This is all I'm going to say on this matter, because I don't want to get drawn 
into a document markup argument.  Feel free to reply, but don't expect a 
response.  I won't take part in an XML vs. S-Expressions / configparser / 
json / yaml / markup-flavor-of-the-month war.

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