On the Soapbox

I remember a buzz a year or so ago about the use of XML as a data storage format, and how XML files would be ideal to take the place of a database in certain situations. And so, I decided to explore that possibility with the kBlog beta.

Since my needs were pretty simple, I didn't use a full-blown XML parser. The XML::Simple module sufficed. XML works, but it's not very efficient. There's the character escaping, there's the problem that in order to parse XML, you need to look for matching start and end tags, etc. I guess the XML::Simple module may not have been the best choice either, but in the end, it didn't seem to be that suitable. There are many other encodings that are more efficient to parse, and I think I'll switch to an encoding of my own for data storage when I do version 1.0, mostly so that kBlog would then depend only on the fairly common POSIX module (but a minor performance enhancement wouldn't hurt, either) (the XML RSS is simple enough that it is already being generated without XML::Simple; generally speaking, XML is easy to create, but annoying to parse without a parser).

I guess the big upside to XML is human readability. It's easy to read and to edit (well, except for all the character escaping that needs to go on; that cancels out a lot of the benefit, actually), but aside from that, XML parsing isn't as efficient. The other upshot is that XML is codified and is a standard. I just wish someone would codify a data transport/storage standard that's geared towards machine readability and parsing efficiency instead of human readability.

Personally, I think XML is a bit overhyped. It's just a transport/storage format, and there are people who talk it up as if it's somehow The Next Big Thing™.