do you think eventually in the future all file formats will be XML compliant?

[dpopiz]

that would be awesome if they were.

is that where things are headed? is there any reason it wouldn't work?

 

[aerialcombat]

I think so. Because the format is so simple and bare yet so powerful. It would be hard to come up with a format better than XML. I don't think it's simply possible because XML is so simple in itself.

Having said that, It's not being spread right now because I guess the general public is not embracing the change to XML. Why? Because it's not that easy to use. It's not what HTML was 10 years ago.

But in the future, we'll see XML everywhere.

 

[notfred]

Give me one good reason to make graphics file formats XML compliant.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

XML is not *supposed* to be used for everything, and there are many cases where it would be pretty braindead (like notfred's example), so I doubt it.

 

[WannaFly]

for text based files, I hope.

Will it - probably not for everything - but it definately plays a huge part in anything i code. XML is great, XQuery is adding the functionality of querys, XSL for formatting, what else could you want?

 

[singh]

I certainly hope not. Text configuration files, for example, would lose their main advantages: readability and resistance to corruption. XML is not the easiest thing to read by a user and a missing tag will render the file useless for automated parsing.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

XML is good for text-based data that is likely to be used by different programs. That way, they just need an xml parser, not a whatever-file-format parser, and since xml is standardized, that's easy. I have seen XML used for config files, but it's not necessarily better than a custom format. Just depends on the situation I suppose. Anything where you will often be hand-editing the file is not a great situation for XML.

 

[WobbleWobble]

Originally posted by: notfred
Give me one good reason to make graphics file formats XML compliant.

If I WDDX your graphics file it'll become XML compliant 😛

 

[aerialcombat]

just think how many percent of the webpages are written in HTML.

It was definitely an overstatement to say that ALL file formats will be XML compliant, but for a lot of other things (etc. database, communication) it's very promising.