[ via Simon Willison ] Another Simon, a developer at Microsoft, writes about his surprise with all of the non-document applications of XML (SOAP, databases, configuration files) out there, and his experience with what he feels are the two problem areas of the original specification: whitespace handling and allowed characters.
After writing a publishing tool that uses XML (Atom, actually) for configuration management, I’ve become leery of using XML everywhere. YAML, favored for configuration management by the Ruby crowd, I don’t care for because you still have to load another parser. In my current project, I’ve gone to describing site configuration in PHP arrays. No extra parser needed, and you can walk the configuration tree using PHP syntax. And there’s the var_export function so you can serialize the configuration files.
If I was working in another language with better out of the box XML support, PHP 5.0 perhaps, I’d rethink the decision to use native configuration files. But I don’t plan to share the config files with other application servers.
