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This might be an unpopular opinion, but I find it terrifying that people keep repeating the same mistakes. Back in the 90s everyone thought that XML would becom

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I find it terrifying that people keep repeating the same mistakes. Back in the 90s everyone thought that XML would become the one and only configuration file format. Instead, it became an epitome of over-engineered enterprise software. Now, people are moving to JSON as a serialization format. It's a lighter-weight and usually sufficient distant cousin of XML, but I still wouldn't like to write my config files in it. The misconception is what might work as a human-readable serialization format is usually tedious as a human-editable configuration format. Unless your app accepts configuration files as untrusted input, it is really not that hard to write a custom key-value -type parser. Think OpenSSH or Samba config files - I find them well-suited for their respective jobs, as they achieve the required level of expression with minimal necessary complexity.

viraptor 9y ago
> it is really not that hard to write a custom key-value -type parser It's not. But then you want to set up that config automatically. So you template them. Then you discover they have slight differences in what they accept and how they handle unknown/repeated values. Then you discover they have different escaping rules. Then that one needs non-latin characters quoted. etc. etc. It's not easy to write parser for each one of them. But if you're installing a full server with 10 different config files, you end up with 10 templates which you just hope never run into any edge case of a particular format. And hope that the next service will just use JSON. Or YAML. Or whatever standardised.
skybrian 9y ago
Sadly, few people can design a text file format that handles escape sequences properly. I asked this as an interview question for a while, and I've also seen people who should know better get it wrong in production. It's a really good thing that these days, people use JSON most of the time.

viraptor 9y ago

> it is really not that hard to write a custom key-value -type parser It's not. But then you want to set up that config automatically. So you template them. Then you discover they have slight differences in what they accept and how they handle unknown/repeated values. Then you discover they have different escaping rules. Then that one needs non-latin characters quoted. etc. etc. It's not easy to write parser for each one of them. But if you're installing a full server with 10 different config files, you end up with 10 templates which you just hope never run into any edge case of a particular format. And hope that the next service will just use JSON. Or YAML. Or whatever standardised.

skybrian 9y ago

Sadly, few people can design a text file format that handles escape sequences properly. I asked this as an interview question for a while, and I've also seen people who should know better get it wrong in production. It's a really good thing that these days, people use JSON most of the time.