Re: ircd.conf considerations / XML

["Jørgen Nielsen" <jbn@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andre Koopal wrote:
> I understand XML is a kind of standard parser, so that makes it attractive
> to use it.

Not just one. XML _is_ a standard and in the future will be used for many
purposes, including transactions aka EDI, configuration files and all other
sorts of 'metadata' describable things.
A lot of wordprocessors has implemented XML as an i/o filter in there next
versions Lotus and Word is examples.

> IMHO this format has a lot of syntactic (sp?) sugar with don't really make
> the config more readable, but do make it more bulky.

Prolly but in the future you will have to get used to it anyway, did you like
HTML? naaah but you have to understand it anyway ;o)

> A format I would personaly prefer is the format which is used by bind 8.
> It is C-like, and has the same possibilities as this format.

Cute format sure, but there is no standard parsers as such for it (yes ofcourse
there is C-parsers but not that gives an easy way to extract the rigth sort of
information. XML SAX parsers and higherlevel XML parsers does though and they
are easy to use.
It is more likely that in the future named.conf for bind 8 will change to XML
format as well than it is that applications being developed with XML as the
configuration format will change to the 'C-like' format. Who knows Apache
allready has an XML-alike format and would probably change to real XML in the
future. You do use apache don't you? :)

> I don't know however if there are standard parsers for it, and if it is
> easy to write a preprocessor.

Why reevent the wheel and in 2-3 years have to eat your hat on hate for XML
anyway *g*

> Just my 2 euro-cents,
> 
> Andre

With regrads to XML drop by http://www.w3.org/xml for teh standard(s) or
http://TAU.SIL.ORG/sgml/xml.html if anyone shoudl feel like spending a night
looking at applications, standards etc etc... ohwell just writting this to
'update' on the fact that XML is a bit bigger than so.

-jorgen