Re: machine-readable explain output v4

On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 23:58 +0200, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Well, I don't think that the fact that we are producing machine-readable
> output means we can just ignore the human side of it. It is more than
> likely that such output will be read by both machines and humans.
> Obviously, we need to make sure that it meets machine processing needs
> first, but once we have done that we should not ignore the human
> requirements.

XML is easy to transform to about anything else. I would vote for the
XML output to only focus on machine readability and completeness, and
then if needed provide style sheets to make it human readable. Then
anybody could have his preferred style to look at it. If there would be
a tool to format the XML according to some style sheet (to make it easy
for those who don't care about XML and style sheets), I would volunteer
to provide the XSL style sheets for different formats on request.

Cheers,
Csaba.