----- Original Message ---- > From: pk <pete...@coolmail.se> > BRM wrote: > > The point of the UI is that you ought not care what goes where, unless you > > are > debugging the UI or the program itself. > > While a UI is important; a good UI is key. > And a plain text editor is, imo, a good UI; everybody knows how to use > it. Why bring in another extra (translation) layer?
That's only good if you always store all options - every possible combination, etc. - at all times. Unfortunately, that's almost never the case. Thus you need to be able to know how to create a good working configuration. This requires having a tool the user can use to edit the configuration, with the tool providing access to the options you otherwise would not know about that also protects you by helping to ensure the configuration is in the valid format. Of course, the tool also has to get upgraded with the changes in the program - so that it knows how to build correct configurations. This is where XML does somewhat shine for configurations - you can get by with a little less by enabling the tool to use XML validation on the configuration file; then even if your tool falls a little behind, it can still validate the configuration file against the DTD/RNG/Schema. But it also means that you MUST have a tool. Ben
