(2005-08-28) Chandler Reducing Xml

Phillip J Eby says that OSAF/Chandler is moving some of its structure from XML to straight Python. Many people misunderstood and/or misrepresented my previous position on XML; the case of Chandler should help to clarify it. Chandler still uses XML for WebDAV, for .xrc files, for sharing, and numerous other use cases where it makes at least some sense to do so. The parcel.xml format, however, was pure excise: a verbose additional language to do things that are more cleanly (and efficiently) done in Python code. It was developed to serve a vision of Chandler as a "data-driven" system, and it was supposed to ultimately support things like GUI editors. Of course, the real sin here was not so much XML per se, as overengineering in advance of requirements.