Hello,

On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 03:01:24PM -0700, Jason Thorpe wrote:
> Sure, Apple has other file formats for plists (like a very compact and 
> fast-to-parse binary plist format), but they're not human readable / editable 
> with standard text tools.  I could certainly entertain the idea of being able 
> to externalize to / internalize from that format... but it is also desirable to 
> keep the text form at the same time, for other reasons.

What about the old NeXTSTEP (is it NeXTSTEP?) text format? If human
readability and editability is a concern, I think it is much more
human-readable and editable. (Imagine using property lists for the kernel
command line - entering a property list in the boot loader would be much
easier in the NeXTSTEP format than in the XML format.)

For reference: XML property lists:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/PropertyLists/Concepts/XMLPListsConcept.html
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFoundation/Conceptual/CFPropertyLists/Articles/XMLTags.html

NeXTSTEP text property lists:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/PropertyLists/Concepts/OldStylePListsConcept.html

For those using the Windowmaker window manager - the text format is used
as the format for its configuration files in GNUstep/Defaults.

Pavel