On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 8:29 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
I don't see any point to inventing yet another markup language for internal data transfer; I'd much rather use something that:
- is a known, implemented standard
- has standard support in PHP
- has standard support in JavaScript
If you feel the need to describe the syntax, you've already lost time and gained nothing. :)
You've gained ease of use, because people don't have to bother learning how to use their language's standard library for the language, if it even has one. Is XML reliably supported in JavaScript? And didn't we have problems with PHP on RHEL not supporting the XML library that was supposed to be standard?
If you can describe the language with a one-line regex, you're using a parser that's in *every* language out there, and that *every* programmer should already be familiar with. Not to mention they could just copy-paste the regex even if they don't know regex, modulo some slashes if their language prefers POSIX. If it can be described by one or two explode()s (like key=val;val;val), even better.
Of course, this can get ugly if you later want to add more capabilities to the format, so JSON or YAML might make sense, but XML is overboard IMO. I'd use XML for text markup only, if that.
But no point in bikeshedding -- if this gets done, whoever does it gets to decide the format.