Hi Just one little XFree-related pro-XML story. Not from DRI, from XKB life. You know, XKB configuration is generally held in /usr/X11R6/lib/xkb directory and several subdirectories. All this would be fine if the format of the files in these directories would be something good, structured, readable (by human and machine). But historically it never was. So some people (mainly me and Ivan Pascal) had a lot of headache trying to make some central configuration repository for XFree 4.3. Do you know which format we choosen? Right, XML. Because developers can edit it. Because GUI configuration tool (I am the author of the one for GNOME) can parse it. Because the structure is rather complex (though we definitely could FIT it into some standard name=value format). Finally, because we could easily provide i18n using intltool. Well, I have to admit there were several files which initially were intended to keep the registry of the configuration. But they were extremely poorly structured. And the format required some special parsing (implemented deep inside XFree). So I found no (GT)UI tools which would actually use them. With new XML format people finally got a hope (and gnomers actually got the implementation) for decent GUI configuration tools for XKB.
I am not DRI developer. But if you care about users (using GUI tools), developers (easily prototyping these tools using perl/python/etc) - please go XML. Cheers, -- Sergey
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