init: API

[Nicolas Mailhot]

BTW in my experience the problem with flat-files is they are
under-specified (lots of text file examples given on this thread are
"loose" syntax which a human will grok but an application won't).

So as long as you have a single app parsing the file all's well, because
the quirks of its built-in parser pretty much define the syntax (and a
custom parser *always* got quirks). But put a second app in the system
(for example a GUI frontend to manipulate the files, written in another
language so it can not share the parser lib) and all Hell breaks lose,
because the gui writer and the cli writer can not agree on the exact
syntax to use.

The *big* advantage of XML files is they have strong syntax rules, in
fact files can be checked using third-party tools like xmllint, so there
is a lot less room for applications bickering about the same file.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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