Raymond Chen has a fabulous blog about Windows. In his recent post, he writes about why .ini files were dropped in favor of the registry and why they are coming into fashion again.
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Why are INI files deprecated in favor of the registry? There were many problems with INI files.
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The registry tried to address these concerns. You might argue whether these were valid concerns to begin with, but the Windows NT folks sure thought they were.
Commenter TC notes that the pendulum has swung back to text configuration files, but this time, they’re XML. This reopens many of the problems that INI files had, but you have the major advantage that nobody writes to XML configuration files; they only read from them. XML configuration files are not used to store user settings; they just contain information about the program itself. Let’s look at those issues again.
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