Steve Allen wrote on 2003-08-15 05:52 UTC:
> Is anyone looking into providing these data as XML?
What benefits would a monster such as XML add here, apart from adding a
rather baroque syntax to otherwise fairly easy to read and parse flat
table data?
Instead of "as XML", you probably mean "in a well-specified file
format". There are many ways to specify file formats, and XML is
arguable one of the more ugly and difficult to use choices on the
market, especially if there is nothing structurewise in your data that
warrants the use of anything more complex than a regular expression
grammar (the simplest level of the Chomsky hierarchy).
[Or to rephrase the late Roger Needham: If you think XML is the solution to
your problem, you probably have neither understood XML, nor your problem.]
If someone wants to specify a nicer EOP file format, please use some
very simple single-record-per-ASCII-line syntax (e.g., comma separated
values, etc.) that can be parsed trivially with a simple single-line
Perl or Awk regular expression.
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
Received on Fri Aug 15 2003 - 06:16:11 PDT