Hello Alan,
I don't want to start a fire of controversy, but if I may agree that
WinApp2.ini is not crystal clear, I've found some minimal description
On Piriform web site that has helped me to code some minimalistic rule
for enhancing CCEnhancer.
http://www.piriform.com/docs/ccleaner/advanced-usage/ccleaner-ini-files/how-to-add-your-own-program-for-ccleaner-to-clean
Back to XML, I'm not sure to understand your remarks (or the meaning
of your remarks). I'm suggesting here to introduce a new feature
to CCleaner: the indirection to find the location of some files to
be purged by looking at *.ini (or XML or Registry) entries.
The fact that some .Net or Java environments are no secure enough
for you has nothing to do with my enhancement request. If you have
a hammer, you can use it properly to mount nails or you can hit your
fingers. The latter case will not forbid the usage of hammers :-)
If I can agree that the previous X11 resource file and the
*.ini file syntaxes are somehow "weak", I can tell quite
imperatively that the XML approach is the answer for all
such cases.
Normally, we start to define a grammar (DTD) for a specific
purpose. This grammar can be used to automatically check the
syntax validity of a given XML file. If the DTD is completely done,
it will be robust, if it's done approximately, it will be weak.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
...
Notice also that we can use many DTD for fully validating one XML file.
There are tons of XML parsers and the usage of such parsers is
most of the time not immediate from a programming point of view.
Such parsers are also based on the DTD for generating the data
structures.
If you tell "usage of robust XML config file" is not obvious.
I tell you: yes you are right.
I would add, if you are a developer, not mastering XML techniques
(in a wide sense) is these days definitely a weakness (whatever
your programming language, Perl, Python, Java, C#, ...)
Tools like Notepad++, Oxygen, Eclipse help to develop XML stuff.
XML is today almost omnipresent on all systems.
I hope these remarks contribute to discuss about the right
points. No personal critics are intended in any way.
Cheers Phil.