Re: machine-readable explain output v4

On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 17:31 +0200, Csaba Nagy wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-08-12 at 17:11 +0200, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > That will just make things worse. And it will break if the XML includes 
> > any expression that contains a line break.
> 
> Then escape the expressions using CDATA or such... I'm sure it would be
> possible to make sure it's one line and rely on that. That's part of
> being machine readable, being able to rely on getting it at all without
> too much parsing magic...

Looks like today I'm talking consistently stupid... CDATA of course
won't help in avoiding line breaks, but it would be still possible to
define an XML entity for that. This starts to be too complicated anyway,
so probably not worth it. In any case I still think making it easy for a
tool to extract/parse the information should be higher priority than
human readability - because the information itself is not really human
readable without external help except for simple queries, and I doubt
the main use case is simple queries.

Cheers,
Csaba.