[Remind-Fans] reminders as XML or HTML?

[Sebastian Stein]

David F. Skoll <dfs at roaringpenguin.com> [050326 20:03]:
> XML is evil, in my opinion, because it's vastly over-complicated for 99%
> of the uses to which it is put.  (Parsing the previous sentence is easier
> for most humans than reading an XML file. :-))

I'm not sure what those 99% are, but in general I think using XML is worth
the effort.

> XML throws out the tried-and-true UNIX notion of having programs communicate
> with each other using simple chunks of text.  Instead, they use this horrible,
> bloated file format that may as well be binary for all the readability
> it possesses.

For this purpose it might be indeed better to have pure text output.

> I'm not saying XML is *always* evil.  But for a simple thing like getting
> reminders out of "Remind" in a computer-parsable format, XML is unbelievable
> overkill.  Try rewriting simple programs like tkremind, rem2ps or rem2html
> to parse XML instead...

Well, and here I see in general the strengths of XML. There are so many well
tested parsers available that you don't have to care anymore how to write
your data to disc and how to load it. The parser does this for you. You
handle the data in memory through some kind of tree of linked list. But you
can skip the task to write this list or tree to a file, the parser will do
this for you.

Anyway, we don't have to start a flame war here. I just did not liked your
initial statement that XML is pure evil, this is just not true. It depends
always on the usage context.

Kind regards,

Sebastian