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

[Alastair Rankine]

On Feb 23, 2004, at 10:26 AM, Craig Sanders wrote:

> 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.

Certainly agree, if you can 100% guarantee that the list format will 
suffice for all possible (likely) evolutionary pathways of the format. 
For example, mandating (as you do below) 7-bit ascii these days 
prettymuch precludes any human-readable text, unless we want to 
restrict it to US English only (a luxury we really can't afford these 
days).

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

Disagree with complex == slow. Simple counterexample: binary vs. linear 
search.
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