On 18 Jan 2010, at 23:09, Alan McKinnon wrote:
...
If we are truly trying to make Linux more accessible, with things
like
the plug and play hal offers, should we even be contemplating editing
config files?
XML is a machine-readable file format that just happens to use ASCII
characters, it is not meant to be modified by a text editor, so if
your
program uses XML configuration files, it should include a means of
editing those files that does not include the use of vim.
which almost by definition means you need an xml-information parser
on par
with an xml-parser to figure out what the hell the fields mean, then
design an
intelligent viewer-editor thingy that lets the user add-delete-
change the
information in the xml file. All the while displaying to the user at
least
some information about the fields in view. Shaes of .chm anyone?
By the time you've done all that and made the thing semi-usable,
you've
expended more effort than if you had written you own xml-parser from
scratch.
This doesn't address Neil's suggestion that we *never* edit config
files, but assuming programmers are going to continue using XML for
this purpose, a dedicated XML editor will surely become a standard on
all distros.
When editing XML files one shouldn't need to be careful of the angle-
brackets or the slashes - as one would be editing the file in a text
editor like vim or nano - because the XML editor should take care of
all that and hide it from the user (on the rare occasions upon which a
user does actually need to edit the config).
If a good XML editor - which treats all XML config files in a standard
manner - is available then I see no problem with programmers utilising
XML.
Stroller.
