[uf-discuss] Non-HTTP/HTML microformats

[Luke Kanies]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Ryan King wrote:

> On Nov 30, 2005, at 3:22 PM, Scott Reynen wrote:
>
> > In addition to removing repetition, using a more human-readable
> > format for machine-only communication greatly simplifies
> > debugging.  That's why JavaScript is far more popular than assembly
> > language.
>
> And developing in general. For example, I write lots of shell scripts
> that end up looking something like:
>
> cat *.log | cut -f2 | grep foo | perl -e "while(<>){print doSomething
> ($_);}" | sort | uniq -c

Just so you know, you can use 'perl -pi -e "print doSomething"' here
instead:

    perl -p -e "s/:/;/g" /etc/passwd

The '-p' gets rid of the need for the "while" loop.

> Of course, to create that, I do it one step at a time and inspect the
> output (often using head or tail instead of cat).
>
> Never underestimate the usefulness of human-readable data.

While that's a great principle, it merely reduces the number of potential
formats from something resembling infinity to a smaller infinite number, so
I'm not sure how much that helps here.

I definitely am not planning on relying on any non-human-readable formats,
but I do think the computer-computer nature of the work I'm doing does
affect other aspects of the formats I'll be using.

-- 
He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.
--John Mason Brown
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com