Re: gEDA-user: Functional blocks and PCB format changes

[Andrew Poelstra <asp11@xxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 10:23:43AM -0700, Windell H. Oskay wrote:
> 
> On Sep 13, 2010, at 9:26 AM, Ouabache Designworks wrote:
> 
> >     On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 09:08:25PM -0700, Andrew Poelstra wrote:
> >> XML is far too heavy, agreed, and it's signal-to-noise ratio is
> >     abysmal.
> > 
> >   True on both counts and you would never want to handcraft a xml
> >   document.
> 
> Why? I'd much rather handwrite XML than YAML.  

Really? It's not the filesize of XML documents that is the concern; it is the
/redundant/ filesize. Even for a single-character tag, you need to type <a>...</a>,
which is 7 characters of non-data text.

To contrast, in YAML you would have

  a: ...

which is 2 characters, plus indentation, and a lot easier both to read and to type.


Practically, consider:
  <layer><name>my-layer</name></layer>

Versus:

  layer:
    name: my-layer

The latter is lighter, simpler, grep-able-er, and shows a clear distinction
between data and metadata.


Machine-generated XML almost never uses whitespace, so it's next to impossible
to determine nesting levels or document validity, not to mention grep and awk
being nearly useless.


> And I'd certainly prefer it to the existing file formats, which I can barely edit without looking up the meaning of each position.
>

Absolutely!



Andrew
 


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