> As to your comments about not having to use tools, well we always use
> tools now.  We just use ones named "vi" or "emacs" (or "ed" for the
> truly insane).  Needing to use different ones doesn't seem like that
> big a deal.

You clearly have never stumbled into the middle of an editor
religious-war flamefest.

It actually *is* a big deal, though, because no one tool is going to be
appropriate for all tasks.  That's why we still ship with two editors
and people commonly install any of numerous others.  No matter what
plist editor you build, it will be a Wrong Thing for at least some
important cases.  The best I can think of, actually, is a tool which
converts between XML and some human-comprehensible format in both
directions, with a run of $EDITOR on a temporary file in between.

> As to "what's so cool about XML," people have said it but you didn't
> hear them.  There are a few reasons, but the big one for me is that
> we end up with multi-stage parsers.  The first stage understands the
> XML, and the second stage or layer understands what the XML is
> describing.

This to me is actually one of the biggest reasons to *avoid* XML: it is
turning the human/computer relationship upside down.  Computers should
do the drudgework so as to make humans' lives easier.  Switching to a
language that makes humans' lives harder simply because it makes
parsing easier is...backwards.

Of course, you may disagree with one or more of the bases that argument
rests on.  But I think that if you grant the bases, the conclusion is
more or less inevitable.

> One advantage is that we can future-proof tools.  If a tool looks for
> a certain object hierarchy in a file, as long as it's there, it
> works.  So we can add extra elements over time that older tools can
> safely ignore.

This is not so much an argument for XML per se as it is an argument for
well-thought-out and extensible configuration languages.  XML may be
one such, but it is not the only one, and quite possibly not the best.

Not that I maintain it is - or isn't - the best such.  I've been
staying out of *that* question and I intend to continue to do so.

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