Ahhh XML, all the penalties of a uncompressed, text-based file with none of the benefits.


well, not *no* benefits... it does have the advantage of being human-readable (though many c-style scripting languages are also).

It''s touted for its extensibility, when really that''s not a very unique property. Of course, few commercial text-parsers out there give you the ability to add your own keywords but that''s not really much of an advantage when you have to deal with proprietary code and file sizes that are 25-35% larger compared to scripts that serve the same purpose.

I guess the only benefit that I actually think redeemable is that a lot of companies are implementing it. Compliance with a standard messaging format is a much-anticipated thing, but it still doesn''t really make that large of an impact in the games industry where companies rarely share the data for their games with each other.

I''m currently on a research project where the messaging amongst the servers and to the client is all done in an XML format, so I''m cornered into using it. I sometimes wish it didn''t take so many bytes to send a simple message but it does help with debugging occasionally. I''m working on a way to send XML code blocks that surround a custom scripting language -- then you could extend the different types of scripts, and even specify the module(s) that are the intended recipients of scripting events entirely based on what type of script-format it is. (Modules would register to listen to a script type, specified by an XML tag)... of course, all that would require writing my own XML parser, whose rules may change at the next iteration of the commercial standard -- but like I said, the messaging protocol probably wouldn''t be shared anyway.

What I would like to see is a messaging format where the debug mode has human-readable text, but at compilation time the tags are converted using something like an ELF-Hash to a messaging format that is much more compact. It is entirely feasible... I just don''t know how many companies would buy into it. Maybe if the debug-mode version was entirely compatible with XML formatted tags...

Proprietary code? XML is not a MS nor Sun thing.
Calling XML ''human readable'' is a little bit of a stretch though
It''s .ini files on steroids, and I''m all for it, because I *hate* the Windows registry.

Free XML parsers:
Tiny XML
Xerces XML


And if the compression thing really bothers you:
zlib


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Didn't the Quickdown Lowdown on XML go over all of this?

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[edited by - bishop_pass on April 30, 2003 11:19:40 AM]