They’re XML, structured into dictionaries and arrays containing key-value pairs. Preference plists are managed, and need special treatment.
XML
When you write a comment to an article here, or edit a Property List, you’re editing XML. Two or three characters won’t work properly.
Have you lost any precious files lately? Old movies of your kids when they were young, perhaps. Wouldn’t it be good to be able to recover them?
The macOS Dictionary app may appear dull and unnecessary, but gives offline access to reputable dictionaries completely free of charge.
A hard to spot runtime error results if you try to embed the key < in a dictionary. But when converting plain text for embedding in XML, that's one character you need to substitute.
You want to read in a property list to structured data in Swift. The solution – in Swift 4 – is in a Coder, as explained here.
Described as a WYSIWYG LaTeX for Mac, this app attempts to provide integrated editing of both marked-up text and rendered pages.
Hypertext returns without any hyperbole, and XML could be much more able to cope with the reality of life.
Preference settings have been a problem since the first public beta of OS X. Why have they never been properly sorted out?
Why is XML still so hard to write, and so poorly supported by accessible tools?
