XML

[Michael Lake]

Phil Underwood wrote:
> 
> My tuppence worth:
> While the CaveSurveyXML looks like a good survey format, it would be
> extremely tedious to actually type in all the formatting, and it would also
> be hard(ish) to directly incorporate data from other formats. One advantage
> of the current survex format is that it is very easy to read data in pretty
> much arbitrary formats, using the *data command. 

Yes XML is verbose. The tradeoff is that it structures your data amoung
other things.
Survey is much bette for hand entry. XML is suited for a GUI interface 
-
or emacs and macros ;-) 

> So what would be needed
> would be some program which takes in the raw data and creates a
> CaveSurveyXML file, yes?

Yep there here now. See my svx2xml and xml2svx programs ! I still enter
data in 
Survex at present but when there are more XML editors around editing the
data 
directly into the XML format will easy. Also if you download
CaveSurvey.dtd and the 
example2.xml into the same directory and open the example2.xml with M$
Explorer
you can expand and collapse and view the structure. The example2.xml
file is more
structured than the example.xml file (note the '2').
 
> Also re: CaveMapXML; these files will also be substantially larger than
> either the old .3d or the .3dx formats, and so quite large for use on a
> Psion or Palm Pilot.

Tru. XML is verbose.
 
> On the other hand, I like the idea of having a stylesheet or some such to
> describe how to display the cave - Chasm can currently selectively disable
> the display of parts of some files, and can also selectively colour bits of
> cave. This is all saveable in the .3dx format. However, when you reprocess
> the data, all the formatting is lost. Which is tedious. Maybe I'll write a
> primitive stylesheet and a program to combine stylesheet with data.

Thats one of the reasons why I wanted to use XML. Users can have their
own stylesheet
either in CSS or XSL. Some might want survey comments in italics, data
in fixed width and 
in a HTML table. No fixed GUI suits everyone so thats why Survey data in
XML + stylesheets 
is the way to go. Users could write stylesheets and upload them so
others could use them.
Unfortunately my Netscrape doesn't do stylesheets yet to test this out.

Mike

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Michael Lake
University of Technology, Sydney
Email: mailto:Mike.Lake@uts.edu.au Ph: 02 9514 1724 Fx: 02 9514 1628 
URL: http://www.science.uts.edu.au/~mikel
Linux enthusiast, active caver and interested in anything technical.
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