Thomas Grill said this at Mon, 1 Dec 2003 17:31:37 +0100:
The main reason is that a key can be any PD atom (except symbols with spaces) in pool, and XML attributes must not contain certain characters (like ' or " , probably others). The format looks a bit more general and robust to me than the one with the attributes. It also _looks_ more transformation-friendly....
It isn't, really. I was hoping to steer you away from this because it resembles Apple's property-list format, and that's a bit of a pain to deal with. However, the fact that you enclose keys and values within a parent value or dir element makes things a lot easier than Apple's format. I'm not sure I'd call it transformation-friendly, but it allows for XPath expressions like this:
//dir[key='bla']/value[key='2']/data (Give me the data for the key #2 that's in any directory with the key bla.)
The interesting aspect of this format is that it allows you to reverse the lookup with minimal effort: //value[data='51']/key (Give me the key for all data values that equal 51.)
Who knows if that functionality is actually useful for us, though...
Yeah, looks good! I can deal with it, and it does seem more sensible than putting the keys in attributes.
adam
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