[uf-discuss] Non-HTTP/HTML microformats

[Ryan King]

On Nov 30, 2005, at 3:22 PM, Scott Reynen wrote:

> Ryan King wrote:
>
>> You see, one of the beauties of The Unix Way, is that, just like  
>> microformats, you can use the same output for both humans and  
>> machines. For example, `ls .` can be read by a human or piped into  
>> something else with `ls . | foo`. No need for two separate  
>> formats. (note to self: need to write blog post comparing µF's to  
>> The Unix Way.)
>
> 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

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.

-ryan
--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com