Hi Burr, I haven't really thought about that...
One problem with XML is that it's a bit more verbose and "techy".
For example with that recent post I was able to tell Don to go to the [Commands] section and set UseDiameterDefault=y. That's pretty straightforward.
The equivalent in XML might be something like "Go to some particular tag that may be nested under another tag, maybe explain what tags are, that they must be closed, ...." It's kind of easy to break an XML structured file if you don't know what the rules are for how it has to be structured.
The .ini file being a kind of "flat" structure with option = value is pretty nice and simple. It's hard to break it, you can type in any kind of garbage on one line and it won't mess up the whole file.
Is there anything in particular that you're looking to gain by having the settings stored in XML rather than in .ini format?
I mean certainly XML is tremendously more flexible for storing structured and hierarchical data, repeated data patterns, and stuff like that, but the needs for just settings storage is pretty modest.
- Michael
|