XML

[David Doolin]

I  started a reply to Phil but trashed it in favor of 
spending that time extending my current xml parser...

>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 wou
>ld also
>> be hard(ish) to directly incorporate data from other formats. One ad
>vantage
>> 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 amoun
>g
>other things.
>Survey is much bette for hand entry. XML is suited for a GUI interface
> 
>-
>or emacs and macros ;-) 

Yes!  emacs and xml are superb together!  Verbosity can be 
vanquished by using gpl data squishing (compression) such
as gzip.  gzipped xml can be extremely competitive in 
file size.


[]
> 
>> Also re: CaveMapXML; these files will also be substantially larger t
>han
>> either the old .3d or the .3dx formats, and so quite large for use o
>n a
>> Psion or Palm Pilot.
>
>Tru. XML is verbose.

But highly compressible!

> 
>> On the other hand, I like the idea of having a stylesheet or some su
>ch to
>> describe how to display the cave - Chasm can currently selectively d
>isable
>> 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 rep
>rocess
>> the data, all the formatting is lost. Which is tedious. Maybe I'll w
>rite 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 

Yup yup yup.  

>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
>.

Mozilla does though (long live the lizard), which means that 
NS 6 does also.  

Couple more things: xml is probably way overhyped for its own 
good.  Java suffered from this highly.  But like Java, its not
the fault of xml.  Java really is superb, and so is xml.
The difference is that xml is not controlled by Sun 
Microsystems, so Sun can't muck it up like they did with Java,
or SunOS for that matter.  

ciao
dmd