Re: [boost] [Boost Review] Property Tree Library

From: Thorsten Ottosen (thorsten.ottosen_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-04-23 03:24:25

Daniel Walker wrote:
> On 4/22/06, Joel de Guzman <joel_at_[hidden]> 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