Re: Config_Files proposal

[Stephen Leake <stephen.a.leake.1@gsfc.nasa.gov>]

"Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> writes:

> XML is significantly better than some of the other formats suggested here
> for one factor: Other tools will be able to make use of it. If it comes to
> displaying an initialization file or using the data in any other way, you
> gain the ability to make them work in entirely new contexts without having
> to do some form of data conversion.

True.

> All other things being equal, gaining an XML parser in the process
> would be A Good Thing. 

Yes, but I think you'll agree that all other things are not equal
today. And since I am _not_ proposing to write an XML parser, but only
to reuse an existing one, we are not "gaining" anything; those parsers
are already there.

> Imagine if one day when everything is sunshine and rainbows and
> pastel unicorns and Ada has some kind of standard means of
> displaying web page stuff, your initialization file XML data slides
> right in there. 

XML is not "web page stuff"; Netscape doesn't know how to display it.
It has to be processed into HTML first (unless I am really missing
something). It's just as easy to process a Config_File into HTML. If
the Config_File standard catches on, it would be reasonable to define
and implement a standard translation to XML and HTML and whatever else
comes along.

> Imagine that once the tools are there to handle XML on input and
> output how many other things might be built on top of Grace that
> could leverage this capability.

Yes, that would be nice. But it is way outside the scope of the
Config_File mandate.

Even if we had better XML tools in Grace today, I think I would not
use XML for Config_Files. It just doesn't meet the requirements;
hand-editing is important, and too hard in XML.

> IOW, use this as an excuse to build an XML DOM & SAX. (I'd like to
> see an OO implementation of this using tagged records and closely
> following the W3C DOM model, despite the very nice non-OO
> implementation done by XML/Ada.)

I don't think we need an excuse for that :).

-- 
-- Stephe