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

[Steve C. <ste...@mq...>]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2001 10:33, Philip Ehrens wrote:
> 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!!

Human readability isn't really one of XML's properties -- more like 
'potential human decodeability' in that it's possible to use XML in such a 
way that the meaning of the structure is transparent. Of course it's also 
possible to use it to make data formats just as opaque as MSWord's binary 
format. 

One of my main motivations for using XML as a serialisation format is that it 
removes the need to invent a new format and write a parser for it.  I'm bad 
at inventing new formats and when I've done it I've always found a little 
later that I need to extend it in some way that I didn't forsee. XML makes it 
much more likely that I'll be able to do that.  It also means that I don't 
need to write the parser (of course this argument doesn't hold if you're 
Steve Ball :-)

Steve