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Regular text files are easy to read and write by humans, XML files are not. I prefer a simple ini format over XML any time.

(2009-09-29, 09:47 AM)frostschutz Wrote: [ -> ]Regular text files are easy to read and write by humans

I don't think so, its not that hard to write <something>value</something>

(2009-09-29, 09:47 AM)frostschutz Wrote: [ -> ]Regular text files are easy to read and write by humans, XML files are not. I prefer a simple ini format over XML any time.

And I'd use XML over ini any time. I think it's simpler because you can group the strings together and just access that part.

(2009-09-29, 09:47 AM)frostschutz Wrote: [ -> ]Regular text files are easy to read and write by humans, XML files are not. I prefer a simple ini format over XML any time.

XML files aren't that bad to write by hand until you start getting really stupid nesting involved. I also like INI files, they make for good config files since they are nice and fast to parse (faster than XML) and you can always group items together in them if you need to.

(2009-09-29, 02:26 AM)TimB. Wrote: [ -> ]We are not really comparing XML files to a database here, we are comparing them to a regular text file system.

And they're usually slower to parse than regular text files as XML imposes some structure which may not be optimal for input.

XML has its use, for storing information in which hierarchy makes sense and you want it to be human readable (to some degree ), but INI is generally better for typical basic settings files which only require name=value pairs.

(2009-09-30, 03:24 AM)Yumi Wrote: [ -> ]

(2009-09-29, 02:26 AM)TimB. Wrote: [ -> ]We are not really comparing XML files to a database here, we are comparing them to a regular text file system.

And they're usually slower to parse than regular text files as XML imposes some structure which may not be optimal for input.

XML has its use, for storing information in which hierarchy makes sense and you want it to be human readable (to some degree ), but INI is generally better for typical basic settings files which only require name=value pairs.

For once, we agree!

Well the instance I am using it for is a basic CMS where there is no database available, so I need for example a page as the partent then the properies of that page as the children, then have several of those pages.