On 03/12/2013 11:10, Dejan Lekic wrote:

On Tue, 03 Dec 2013 11:44:43 +0100, Sönke Ludwig wrote:

Am 03.12.2013 10:43, schrieb Dejan Lekic:

As much as I dislike XML, I think it is not a good idea to ignore it. XML should definitely be among the supported formats. Also, it would be nice to have a converter between them in the case package owners decide to switch to an alternative.

I don't know, the purpose of the alternative format discussed here is
supposed to improve human readability (which XML surely doesn't offer).
But on top of that I really think it would be a bad idea to complicate
the system with more formats without a very good reason. JSON should be
universal enough as the standard format for machine data exchange. What
would XML really offer additionally in practice?

Having said that, SDL is structurally more or less the same as XML, so a
generic XML<->SDL converter could be used for this.

I would agree with to a certain degree. But the moment your project becomes complicated, no format will make it readable. You will struggle with any format, especially when you autogenerate (and that is going to happen) DUB JSON. And the more it is close to be machine readable than human readable the higher is the need of a tool that can aid person in altering something. There are thousands of XML tools out there, as you already know. Plus, it is a standard exchange format in many environments. I've seen literally unreadable JSON in many places, and I am 100% sure you have seen it too. DUB JSON files will probably continue being human readable because humands made them, and edit them. :)

I agree with Sonke here, supporting XML would just be an unnecessary
distraction.
No data format is truly unreadable, unless it just used for
machine-to-machine/program-to-program interaction. And even so, there
might be times a human might have to look at it (say, debugging the
communication for example).
Rather, the question is not if it's readable or not, but how readable it
is, how simple and succint the data language is. And it is of value to
have a succint data description language for DUB, since a lot of the
times it will be read and edited by humans.

Plus, JSON is well supported accross a variety of languages:
www.json.org (scroll bellow) , so it's not too far from XML.