On Jun 6, 2006, at 10:06 PM, Peter Seebach wrote:

> According to a quick find|xargs file, about 93% of plist files on a  
> Mac OS X
> system are XML text.

I think the main user of binary plists in OS X is for app / system  
prefs.  Most everything does use XML -- lots of Info.plist files for  
bundles, for example.

> I assume they've documented the bplist format, but I'm not sure how  
> much anyone
> cares in practice.

They are definitely faster, in part because there is so much less  
encoding going on... and also because duplicate objects are actually  
flattened and stored only once in the bplist (which also makes them  
smaller).

The flattening part is actually the toughest thing to do in our  
proplib wrt. bplist support.

-- thorpej