Re: iTunes Music Store XML

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From: Paul Mison
Subject: Re: iTunes Music Store XML
Date: 09:50 on 22 Apr 2004
On 21/04/2004 at 09:02 -0700, Darrell Fuhriman wrote:

>But then, here's my question... Why in god's name would you care
>how elegant the XML structure iTunes uses is?  It's not really
>meant to be parsed by humans, especially humans who don't work at
>Apple, and the computer couldn't care less. Even a programmer is
>going to use a higher-level API.

Except where your language doesn't have a plist-parsing API, so you 
have to hack together the right sort of SAX parser yourself. (Just 
running a big plist through a DOM parser then rearranging it is a 
really shit idea. Parsing the XML (slowly) with regular expressions 
is an even worse one.)


I suppose that makes the language and its extensions hateful, too. 
I'm wary of going (back) there though.

Oh, and no, I don't work at Apple. I'd still quite like to be able to 
parse the iTunes Music Library.xml than the binary format iTunes 4 
Music Library file. Same for the iPhoto library.

-- 
:: paul
:: historic light cone
There's stuff above here

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