Le mercredi 29 mars 2006 à 04:44 +0100, Bill Crawford a écrit :
A list of common pit falls.
Pitfall #1 : creating the perfect general serialization API so developers can save whatever data they feel like to without thinking 5s how other people will interact with it. This is what I call software-oriented junk
Pitfall #2 : creating handcrafted file format no standard tools can interact sanely with. This is human-oriented junk
People tend to dismiss XML because a lot of its proponents have fallen in pitfall #1. Usually they jump in pitfall #2 as a result.
A popular way to combine pitfall #1 and #2 is to create configuration tools which use a private data backend with pitfall #1, and convert it at save time in the actual handcrafted app conf file with pitfall #2.
Good projects start by choosing general syntax rules that make software happy (usually XML) then fine-tune them with humans in mind (what if the whole file had to be written by a human in a text editor and you had to write the associated manual) See for example fontconfig, apache ant syntax, etc