XML/XSD based configuration files.

[Frans Englich]

On Tuesday 07 December 2004 19:14, Cristian Tibirna wrote:
> On Tuesday 07 December 2004 13:44, Frans Englich wrote:
> > > needed. XML is not nearly as human friendly, and i think that's an
> > > important thing to keep in mind as well.
> >
> > I would consider that such a low priority it can be neglectable; that
> > people need to manually hack files is the bug, not that it's difficult.
>
> I'm sure that if you read the above you disagree with yourself. Needing to
> manually manipulate own data (configurations in this case) isn't a bug.
> It's an inalienable right!

If you like. A right a small percentage of our users has the skills and 
interest to exercise. It's nothing wrong with having that right, it just 
doesn't matter for the vast majority of our users -- the /overall/ result 
wouldn't be nice if we went for a solution which made it top notch for geeks 
like us, and made it negative for the wide majority. This is getting 
theoretical(not that it isn't needed).

> And that's one of the reasons Windows obscures
> config in the first place, very probably.

(Similar to how integration does not equal lock-in -- Konqueror has 
integration without lock-in -- does the inability to manually edit physical 
text files not mean that user influence cannot be reached in other ways.)


However, I think Aaron's comments on the matter shows flaws in my reasoning -- 
the ability is not fully neglectable as I wrote; it do matters for the IRC 
case, for example. One can draw a parallel to XML; one reason it took off, 
from what I have read, was its low entry threshold; it didn't require some 
obscure tool for inspecting a binary format, only a plain text editor.

The ability to manually edit text files(if that's now the physical format) 
isn't irrelevant as I initially wrote, but it sure must have a low 
priority(and where how much it is compromised depends on how important other 
aspects of the matter are).


Cheers,

		Frans