Re: gnome-config problems

[Olof Oberg <mill pedgr571 sn umu se>]

On Thu, 29 Jan 1998, Cheng-Chang Wu wrote:

> Jason Gilbert wrote:
> > 
> > I've always liked the way apache does their config files.  They use a
> > HTML-ish syntax. It would seem especially nice for writing configs for
> > objects.
> > 
> 
> Then I need a new special HTML-Editor and Browser:(
> Writing html from scratch without a HTML-Editor is a tedious job for me.
> The original HTML-File is not easy to read too (not easy to find a tag
> and its parameter)
> 
> I think SGML is only good, when we have long texts in the documents.
> 
> <tag>
>  ...a long text without tags or with few tags ...
> </tag>
> 
> Besides, apache has total control over their tags in config files. Have
> we?
> 
> Can I add a new tag for my application?
> 
> I am new to sgml. I have learned how to write in sgml, but not how to
> extend it. If it is not easy for a application developer to extend the
> tags-system, he will not use it.
> 
> By the way, can I easily add a new tag in a guile-ized config files? How
> can I do it? and how can my application get the config data. I hope I
> don't need to read a whole scheme book to implement my application.

HTML is somewhat ambigous with its optional end tags and it is 
a closed set of tags defined by W3C (something the big two have 
have had a hard time to understand). So I think the options are 
a SGML application, XML application or Scheme. Since XML will 
be more than enough to do it (plus that it will be the most 
common format on WWW soon) I think it is preferable over SGML. 
Still for GNOME I think Scheme is the best when you already 
have Guile to parse things for you. 

No need to write

<applet>
<param name="foo" value="bar">
</applet>

when 

<applet>
<param name="foo" value="bar"/>
</applet>

is more obvios for the parser, but then 

(applet
	(param foo bar)
)

is even better :)

imo

 /mill


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