Alan Horkan wrote:
Again it is not so much other applications understanding the format so much as having the immediately be able to recognise them as XML without requiring any magic.
That's pretty much a non-issue. Most every XML-savvy editor will autodetect an XML file from it's preamble.
In terms of the file extension I am thinking of wanting to have .xml associated with either your favourite text editor (vim, emacs, nano, kate, nedit, whatever) or your favourite genric XML editor (conglomerate, mlview, vex, kxmleditor, xmlspy). It is not about the other applications understanding the actual format of the xml so much as not putting up any barriers to editing it in your favourite (XML) editor. Changing the extension means needing to add mime types or associations.
And what ammount of work is needed for that?
In general, just double-click on the .inx file, the OS will ask what program to open it with and give you a checkbox to remember the choice.
That's all. Problem solved in a few seconds, only once for any given user/computer. So it's both trivial to solve and rarely encountered.
I would urge you to keep using .xml for the reasons I have outlined until there are a specific benefits to using a different extension.
I would urge to avoid ".xml" as much as possible. That's overloading a generic term with specific meaning. In general, the concept is akin passing all parameters in Java as String or Object, or passing all parameters in C/C++ as void *.
What about people who want to edit .inx in a different XML editor than other types? If you overload the name, there is no easy way for them to do it. However, if it has a different name, then it is trivial for a user to have a single application open both that and .xml, but still allows a different user to assign specific editors to specific file types.
Aditionally, I work with many different types of XML files constantly. (My first step when documenting anything is to write a .xml and a .xsl to generate HTML from it, etc.). There's a *huge* benefit also in being able to browse a directory and sort by extension to see the different types of files.
Just imagine if Microsoft had called .ini files .txt files instead. That's pretty much the route you're advocating.