Forensic Analysis and Plain Text


05/05/2003

The last installment of our interview is now up on Artima.com. In this outing, Dave and I talk about the importance of plain text—why you want to ensure that precious data remains readble long after the programs that manipulated it may have turned to dust. Or spare electrons, as the case may be.

Is XML plain text? Here’s my reply from the interview:

“Ant is actually a really good example, because in that case you’re using XML as a user-specified input language, which is really inappropriate in that context. I’d much rather have a genuine grammar. I want to be able to type something that’s simple and easy for me. I don’t care if it’s easy for the tool to parse, that’s the tool’s problem. I want it to be easy for me to write. And in cases like that, it’s really the case of the tool’s author saying, “Oh look, here’s an existing XML parser, I can use it to read in XML files.” So one programmer in this context puts a burden on the other 100,000 programmers trying to use his or her product.


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