Sept. 12, 2013
1:39 p.m.
On Thu, 12 Sep 2013, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
What's wrong with XML. Parsers are easy to obtain.
Please not XML. The tzfile parser needs to be lightweight, whereas XML parsers tend to be large, or limited to a subset of the format.
The code that interprets the structure can ignore any entity they don't understand, giving complete extensibility.
You can do the same with simple binary formats, such as Type-Length-Value, and you can have a bit in the type field to say ...
"if you don't know what an 'abc' is, raise an error now rather than trying to understand the contents".
--apb (Alan Barrett)