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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Desktop Entry Standard / XML
From:       Andreas Pour <pour () mieterra ! com>
Date:       1999-05-15 23:22:08
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pbrown@redhat.com wrote:

> Several people have suggested to me that the new Desktop Entry Standard
> define the on-disk file in XML.  What we really care about is the actual
> keys and values, the on-disk format isn't nearly as important.  XML would
> give us a clearly defined, hierarchical system (something the current
> ini-like format lacks) which we already have a parser for in Qt 2.0.
>
> The GNOME guys are in favor of "fixing this" as well.  They would have to
> go through the same sort of pain as us in switching to this new file
> format, as their on-disk format currently is INI-like as well.
>
> Comments welcome.

Although this is theoretically nicer, one of the nice things about
KDE configuration files has been you can edit them by hand.  Using XML, even
if pretty-printed, is basically going to prevent non-programmers from
editing these files by hand, since XML is significantly more complex that
"key=value".

You guys may think XML is trivial, but my sister won't :-).

I'm not saying not to use XML, I'm just making a comment.  Personally, I
think as long as you can right click on the kdelnk icon and get a nice
GUI interface to edit it, and this GUI is smart enough to recognize all
entries, that's fine.  For that to work, the XML would need to include some
meta-data explaining to the GUI editor what each field is.  Perhaps and
"editor-comment" field, as well as an "editor-type" field that can have an
enumerated list of permitted options or an indicator like "path", "string"
or "integer".  This way, when a program adds a new configuration field, the
editor can handle it.

Regards,

Andreas Pour

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