On Wednesday 30 January 2008, Hubbard, Greg L wrote:
Damian Conway in "Perl Best Practices" (published by O'Reilly) says "Don't use XML as your configuration file format. It may be human-readable, but it's almost never human-comprehensible, and the ratio of mark-up to content is vastly too high." He goes on to argue that configuration files should use a format that is much more like what Henrik has implemented in the non-Big-Brother-legacy-format, and suggests several CPAN modules that Perl programmers can use to parse these formats in their programs.
I fully agree with this notion -- let's keep Hobbit "XML-free"! I recently used the ini format. Very easy to read and change. There is also a nice perl module to process the files. I'm sure there are C libraries as well.
Stef