[Tutor] Expletive Deleted

[Ralph H. Stoos Jr.]

My  $.02,

First, I subscribed to this list to help learn Python as my first
language so my opinion is far from expert.  In my real job, I am
attempting to get our real programmers to support exporting one of our
system logs in XML format, hence, the following opinion.

I think XML is a tool that allows non-programmers to look at structured
data and have it a in human readable form that gives us a chance of
understanding that structure. 

The other strength that I can see is this:  Once data is in this format,
and a tool has been written to parse it,  data can be added to the
structure (more elements) and the original tool will not be broken by
this.  Whatever it is parsed for is found and the extra is ignored.

Without a doubt, the overhead XML adds over say, something as simple as
CSV is considerable, and XML would appear to be rather more hard to work
with in things like Python and PERL.

So, I think XML has it's place but I will not fault anyone for trying to
make it easier to get code to work.

Good Luck in all endeavors,

Ralph