Meng Weng Wong wrote:
On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 01:53:07PM -0500, George Schlossnagle wrote:
| IMHO 'human-readable' data formats are over-rated when their
| consumers are all automated processes.
That's actually an argument in favour of XML.
It's also incorrect. SPF records are also read by humans, just as
Received-by lines are; the combination are a useful tool for people
manually "debugging" spams.
> If we weren't dealing with 20 year old technologies we would agree in
> an instant that XML was appropriate.
This bit of "we" doesn't. I'm quite familiar with XML (I use RSS a lot
and am in the process of converting a CMS to use XML input) and I think
that it is entirely the wrong technology for the job.
Especially when records will primarily appear on one line. XML is only
readable by humans when it's properly indented. Plain text MX records
actually form a nice human-readable "sentence".
It's easier for machines to read, because we already have XML libraries
and a toolkit.
Which are inevitably going to be larger and slower than SPF parsers,
which are trivial to write.
SPF is easier for humans to write but at the end of the day most people
are still using a wizard.
Do we have any stats on this?
SPF XML
easy for lay people to write slightly harder for lay people to writep
XML is *much* harder for lay people to write up than SPF
easy for XML nerds to write very easy for XML nerds to write
XML is harder for XML "nerds" to write up than plain SPF. To write up
the XML form you need to know a complex hierarchal set of SPF-specific
tags. (XML is a method, not an end-use language, so the comparison isn't
really SPF vs XML, but plain-text SPF against SPF-XML
new parsers have to be written parsers kind of already written
less extensible theoretically more extensible
XML parsers are only already written in the most basic sense; they're
generally about as useful and feature-packed as 'readline()'; you still
have to handle all the data in context.
XML is also only "more extensible" in this sense that it has hierarchal
capability. I don't see that we need to use this, and if we did, it
would rapidly lead to horribly complex records.
thoughts?
Why *does* The Mysterious Doctor X want to use XML? Do they know?
Wechsler
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