[LINK] E-mail viruses blamed as spam rises sharply

[Craig Sanders]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 09:36:38AM +1100, Rankine, Alastair J (Alastair) wrote:
> > You see the same thing now with XML.  Try getting a standard up which
> > doesn't use use an XML encoding.  I don't know who many times people wanted
> > to replace simple text lists in iSCSI with some hard-to-parse XML
> > representation.
> 
> Not sure whether you're saying that all XML is implicitly hard-to-parse, or
> whether the previous XML-based proposals in your specific domain of interest
> are particularly obtuse... ?

it seemed to me that his point was that XML is unneccessarily hard-to-parse
compared to a simple list.  when all that is needed for a particular
application is a simple list, then don't complicate it with fancy configuration
formats.

the more complex the code, the slower it runs and the more likely it is that
there will be bugs.


> In general, an interchange of plain text needs to have an a-priori agreement
> (or out-of-band communication) for things like charset usage, line endings,
> escape characters, byte order (for multibyte encodings), etc, etc.

for simple text lists, you can assume plain 7-bit ascii, LF for end-of-line,
and \ as the escape character.....same as many other simple text protocols
(e.g. smtp).


> A nice summary of XML's virtues:
> http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/24/XMLisOK

XML certainly has many advantages, and is very useful where it is appropriate.
not all problems require this particular hammer, though.

craig