XML serialization functionality

[David Faure]

On Wednesday 29 March 2006 00:05, Frans Englich wrote:
> Why is indentation needed?
Readability.

> With my limited knowledge, the only one I see who would gain from having the 
> document indented is those who decides to extract and open the XML 
> documents(and hack it). 
Yes.

> Indentation seems to me like a feature that has,  
> relatively speaking, a very small user base, at the cost of CPU and storage 
> usage of all users. 
Given the zipping, I have yet to see proof about any relevant storage difference :)
The CPU difference can't be too big either, but ok, it's not 0.
However we have to rework loading before saving is any kind of performance issue
compared to our current QDom-based loading :) Overall I'm rather happy with
the saving performance when using KoXmlWriter.

> With reservations, it sounds like it is a feature that  
> should be skipped, and thus make KOffice even more lighter and user-oriented.
> Those who want to hack the format can easily run the file through an XML 
> indenter or open it in an XML editor, imho.
That is true, and indeed I now got used to that when debugging xml files
(see scripts on www/areas/koffice/developer/fileformat - in svn while koffice.org is unreachable).
But I know that the first time I saw a completely unindented xml file from OOo
I thought "yuck" ;-)

To conclude, I agree. I think we can live with unindented xml files where performance matters.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).