[ARIN-consult] Automated templates

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> I really don't see a need to make this overly complicated 
> with XML when for what ARIN templates require a simple 
> attribute/value pairing and
> RFC-822 style plain text is quite adequate to the task.
> 
> attribute: value
> 
> What more do we need?

How do you correctly represent the name of one of Canada's 
two largest cities, Montréal in plain text? I suppose
you could use some non-ASCII encoding, but which one?
XML solves that and a host of other parsing problems.
The toolkits that people use to build REST clients
and servers already have XML handling baked into them.
No need to worry about whether or not a comma will cause
things to go into the wrong db field.

Since the API under discussion is about communication
between a client application and a server application,
there is nothing simple about RFC 822 format and it 
is not adequate to the task. Let's face it, nowadays
XML is COTS (Common Off-The-Shelf) technology, and
wrestling with RFC 822 objects is uncommon, and generally
requires customized coding.

--Michael Dillon