Re: [gentoo-user] Devicekit - especially just for Dale

[Stroller]

On 18 Jan 2010, at 23:09, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> ...
>> If we are truly trying to make Linux more accessible, with things
>> like
>> the plug and play hal offers, should we even be contemplating editing
>> config files?
>>
>> XML is a machine-readable file format that just happens to use ASCII
>> characters, it is not meant to be modified by a text editor, so if
>> your
>> program uses XML configuration files, it should include a means of
>> editing those files that does not include the use of vim.
>
> which almost by definition means you need an xml-information parser
> on par
> with an xml-parser to figure out what the hell the fields mean, then
> design an
> intelligent viewer-editor thingy that lets the user add-delete-
> change the
> information in the xml file. All the while displaying to the user at
> least
> some information about the fields in view. Shaes of .chm anyone?
>
> By the time you've done all that and made the thing semi-usable,
> you've
> expended more effort than if you had written you own xml-parser from
> scratch.


This doesn't address Neil's suggestion that we *never* edit config  
files, but assuming programmers are going to continue using XML for  
this purpose, a dedicated XML editor will surely become a standard on  
all distros.

When editing XML files one shouldn't need to be careful of the angle- 
brackets or the slashes - as one would be editing the file in a text  
editor like vim or nano - because the XML editor should take care of  
all that and hide it from the user (on the rare occasions upon which a  
user does actually need to edit the config).

If a good XML editor - which treats all XML config files in a standard  
manner - is available then I see no problem with programmers utilising  
XML.

Stroller.