13 4 2010-01-25T17:21:37-05:00 NormanWalsh 2009Norman Walsh On the serendipitous joy of finding XML. As I've said before, I'm very reluctant to use your application if it's a roach motel for my data. It would not be fair to say that I'll refuse to use your application, it's just a lot less likely. For example, when it came to GSD, I decided that open access wasn't as important as picking an application that I'd actually use. If I let myself get distracted by exploring APIs, there'd be other things not getting done! (Priorities!) Having made my bed, I figured I should see what I was lying in. Today I took a peek at how OmniFocus stores data. Now, the title of this essay no doubt gives away the punch line, so consider for a moment how this would have been done in the time before XML. …go on, have a think, I'll wait… In my experience it would probably have been in some proprietary format, almost certainly binary, and utterly opaque. How many tools document(ed) their proprietary data formats? On some platforms, there might have been system services for storing data, some sort of platform-supported database perhaps. Those systems are (often) only marginally better. They produce, instead of an opaque stream of bits, an opaque stream of atomic values. (Don't get me wrong, I've done the reverse-engineering thing on binary formats, I'd prefer the stream of atomic values, believe you me.) What did I find when I went looking at the OmniFocus data? A directory full of ZIP files. And what's in each ZIP file? Why contents.xml, of course! Now, it would not be fair to assert that this is perfectly transparent. XML isn't magic. There are clearly some cross-reference relationships in there that will take a little mental gymnastics to decode. But still, I'll trade this: 2010-01-21T16:23:08.983Z 2010-01-24T21:01:41.632Z Add server-side support for multipart MIME to tests.xproc.org 2113929216 2010-01-27T22:00:00.000Z 2010-01-24T21:01:41.622Z parallel ...]]> for anything I would ever have gotten at any other point in the history of file formats! XML has its detractors. It would not be fair to say they are all wrong. But I'll take XML over fair any day!