Hi, On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 10:37:25PM +0100, tomas pospisek wrote: > On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Eduard Bloch wrote: > > > Fine. And do you really think, XML is perfectly human readable for > > manual editing? I doubt. And if it is not meant for manual editing, what > > is the point of making such bloat around of few values? > > I do not want to comment your other points (I very well _may_ agree). XML > _is_ easy to edit, it just takes the right editor, that hides the <""=> > eye-brain-flow-distruptors away and visualizes the tree structure. That > means no ascii editor. I think it would be much better to use filesystem directories to represent such a tree structure and with short files as the "attributes" which would contain a single value each of whatever data type, to do that. You also need an editor to present this as a coherent whole, but I think even a souped-up VIM directory edit mode could do that. Then, if open()'ing the directory without an O_DIRECTORY flag would allow you to read and write the whole data tree, we'd have solved our age old registry/config file problem, by exploiting the power of the filesystem and the Unix API. DJB seems to have similar ideas, look eg. at the configuration system for dnscache and friends. (Dreaming further) If we'd have an IPC model like the pipe or using zero-copy shared memory that could deliver sequenced messages instead of streams (akin to SOCK_SEQPACKET in the BSD sockets model) between processes, or threads sharing the same address space, and we could ask the kernel to map the received message as a directory plus contained file data (see above), then we wouldn't need XML or its APIs anymore to transfer trees of structured A/V pairs; we'd just use the Unix API. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies / Emile van Bergen | emile@e-advies.info tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 | http://www.e-advies.info
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