Re: XML libs (was Re: gconf backend)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 07:23, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-09-28 at 09:07, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > By inferior error messages I mean something like "attribute doesn't
> > match regexp 'big scary regexp'" is worse than "attribute must have
> > format #RRGGBB or gtk:fg[NORMAL]" (pick many other similar examples,
> > browse metacity/src/theme-parser.c).
> 
> Personally, I think these error messages would never be seen by sensible
> users, so it's not a problem that's worth spending lots of time one.

That's not true. Admins will edit the dbus config file, and theme
authors will edit the metacity theme files, for example. I've had theme
authors comment on how helpful the error messages were. Still room for
improvement no doubt. ;-)

It's not just error messages, it's also that to me it's far harder to
come up with a regexp for
"#RRGGBB"|"randomcolornamefromrgb.txt|"gtk:fg[NORMAL]" than it is to
write a small C function. The regexp would be fricking huge and
unmaintainable.

Similarly, some things are quite hard to express via DTD, and I think
the requirements of a metacity theme file would be one of them. Elements
can inherit from and refer to one another by name, and I doubt the
required relationships of that kind could be expressed.

Havoc