<story><title>In praise of... text files and protocols</title><url>http://blog.jgc.org/2012/04/in-praise-of-text-files-and-protocols.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>strags</author><text>So... for the one occasion out of a million where somebody needs to &quot;debug&quot; a piece of data, it&apos;s necessary to suffer the bloat of a text format for every other piece of data we transmit?&lt;p&gt;How about we just standardize on a binary data representation (eg. MessagePack), and use common tools to export/import to/from a human-readable format? Best of both worlds.&lt;p&gt;And, as an aside - why are we using XML? It&apos;s ok as a markup language, I guess, but as a container for data? We could hardly have picked a worse format:&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s &lt;i&gt;crazy&lt;/i&gt; verbose - even when compared to other text formats (eg. JSON). Compare:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  values: [1,2,3]
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
with:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;#60;values&amp;#62;
    &amp;#60;value&amp;#62;1&amp;#60;/value&amp;#62;
    &amp;#60;value&amp;#62;2&amp;#60;/value&amp;#62;
    &amp;#60;value&amp;#62;3&amp;#60;/value&amp;#62;
  &amp;#60;/values&amp;#62;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Its verbosity makes it hard to read, and hard to edit.&lt;p&gt;It has a poor mapping to the structures we actually use while programming - it has no built-in notion of arrays. It has superfluous node &quot;attributes&quot; that don&apos;t map well to common run-time constructs.</text></comment>
<story><title>In praise of... text files and protocols</title><url>http://blog.jgc.org/2012/04/in-praise-of-text-files-and-protocols.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mwexler</author><text>This reminds me of the angst that came when Windows shifted from &quot;.ini&quot; files with clear name=value lines to the &quot;registry&quot;, which paid many the bills of consultants, utility programmers, and &quot;fixit-guys&quot; via the fun that is Regedit.&lt;p&gt;+1 for more simple text files... and hey, devs: if you don&apos;t need a nested object format, perhaps even leave out the JSON or XML and just make a simple file...</text></comment>