Re^6: Search and replace again

[ikegami]

I'm not going to argue that XML isn't text. At some levels, it definitely a valid position to think of XML as a text format. (It's human readable and human editable, after all.)

But topic at hand is far lower level, and such details does matter. Let's compare HTML (a text format) and XML (a binary format).

	HTML	XML
MIME type	text	application (binary)
Character Encoding	External to document	Embedded in document
Parser	The document must be decoded prior to being given to the parser or information allowing the parser to do so must be provided to the parser.	The document cannot be decoded prior to being given to the parser because the document must be parsed to determine its encoding.
Generator	The document must be returned unencoded or the generator must indicate which encoding was used to encode it.	The encoding must be chosen before the document is generated, so the text in the document is already encoded.

Your definition may differ. This is the one I was using.