Re: [Tclxml-users] How to generate an XML document using TCL

[Philip E. <pe...@li...>]

Without defending XML itself, it is trivially easy to convert XML
to HTML ;^)

That said, I would like to tell a little story.

On our project, we intended to adopt XML as our lightweight
data format, because it is supposed to be human readable.

Unfortunately, our imagined idea of what XML looks like was
naive; XML is not very readable!!

We wound up adopting a special "internal" lightweight format
that looks like we wished XML looked, and everybody who sees
it can read it almost from the get-go.

We also wrote conversion libraries that convert our internal
format to XML, but it comes out so ugly that nobody ever does
it.

The internal format has nice things like this:

(line has been wrapped)

<int_4s compression='9' format='base64' name='my_data'
        comment='this is my data'> ... </int_4s>

So, I guess XML is to prevent us from writing non-portable
but more readable formats.  But I, for one, think maybe
it's got a bit out of hand.

ski wrote:
> 
> Sunil suggests [reading between the lines] the end result is to
> view this inventory data with a browser. so again, "why XML?"