On Sun, 16 May 1999, Cristian Tibirna wrote:

> > You assume that the current format is considered really readable by
> > everyone.  Add enough tabs and/or spaces and XML can be made quite
> > readable.
> 
> You implicitely consider yet more work at making it readable, apart from
> the work needed for the switch.

Not really.  Consider that you have one element on a line, and then 3 *
depth spaces before the tag.  That's not too terribly hard, and makes
thing somewhat easier to read.

> > > - incumbs a high transition price when switching from the current format .
> > > - backwards compatibility of apps would have huge costs
> > 
> > If a similar interface was provided, and a script to automagically convert
> > the old format to XML, would switching really be that much of a pain?
> 
> The script would be another piece of code to debug and maintain.

Well, how much variation is there really in the kdelnk files?  To me it
seems like they're all forced to follow a rather standard format, meaning
that the biggest problem would be dealing with "opaque" data types.  But
even then, we're not adding data types, so this isn't a huge issue.

> ATTN: I don't try to slam the idea of switching to XML. I just try to
> put on an even level the elements which will help us to decide if the
> switching would be worth the work.

It's certianly going to be quite a bit of work, but this is also for KDE
2.0, which means, we have time and the desire to do things right as
opposed to taking the easiest choice.

> Until now I only heard that a switch wouldn't be so hard. I didn't hear,
> though, any compelling advantage of this switch.

Well for starters, we'd gain more flexibility.

- alex