Daniel Walker wrote:
On 4/22/06, Joel de Guzman <joel@boost-consulting.com> wrote:
Thorsten Ottosen wrote:
I have not yet understood why xml needs to be so sophisticated, and will probably continue to ignore all those wierd an advanced xml-features.
I agree. I have the same observation. Most practical uses of XML are actually very simple. I too do not understand why XML needs to be so sophisticated.
All the significant projects I know of that use XML tend to use namespaces and schemas, for example Mozilla, Gnome, OpenOffice. Namespaces are useful in XML for the same reason their useful in C++: modularity, which is good if you're dealing with a project maintained by more than one author with shared components that encode data as XML.
Schemas give you data types and type checking, which obviously is nice to have when you're dealing with data. I think XML schema validation is one of the most import features of XML for the same reason that I like C++ templates and type-safe compile time polymorphism: making sure your data types are correct before hand gives you one less thing to worry about.
Why is that better than a run-time exception when loading the file?
For anyone interested in becoming convinced of the usefulness of these XML features I would suggest the tutorials at http://www.w3schools.com.
There's like 17-18 tutorials on XML. I rest my case.
I don't think this has any repercussions for property_tree other than to recognize that for the initial release it won't scale beyond trivial application configurations.
I think it is important that it never scales beyond simply things.
That may be fine to begin with, but at some point Boost users may have higher expectations. We're spoiled rotten by Boost.Regex and others.
That's where a full xml-library comes in handy. -Thorsten