It's only self-documenting if it's readable. As soon as you go beyond the trivial, XML seems to become unreadable.
Just like Perl. Unless you make the effort to learn it. Oh, just like Perl.
And even with those stock parsers, I have to write so much supporting code that it would be no more effort to design a custom format. In fact, using some common perl modules it's considerably *less* effort. I like Storable.
I don't know, that's hardly my experience. Yesterday I needed to autogenerate an XML Schema for a bunch of files, in order to compress them. All schema generators suck. XML Schema is a big fat horrible beast. Yet the whole thing that works like a charm totals 130 nicely spaced lines, only a third of which concerns XML (the rest being manipulating Perl data structures in various ways).
I don't see how Storable would have helped.
XML is still useful - it's a nice intermediate format for sending data between two independent systems which may be written in different languages with different sets of available libraries. But other than that, I don't see the point. It strikes me as crazy to do anything with XML other than: generate it from $native_data_storage parse it into $native_data_storage
and both of those should be kept to a minimum because they're a pain in the arse.
That's because you're a data head. The above doesn't really work for documents which, as it is, were XML's original goal. As much as Storable rocks, I wouldn't want to write SVG, or XHTML, or XilBook into a Storable file.
-- Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Research Engineer, Expway http://expway.fr/ 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
