XML

[Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@...>]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 06:17:16AM -0000, boardgamesbook wrote:
> --- In piecepack@yahoogroups.com, Nick Moffitt <nick@z...> wrote:
> > begin  Ed Thorn  quotation:
> > > What's wrong with TXT?  Plain old text, anybody remember text?
> > > Everyone can read it, everyone can edit it.
> > 
> > 	What's more, you can keep yourself to strict formatting
> > guidelines in a sort of wiki-esque way to make automatic 
> reformatting
> > easier.  Just look at the format the original Fudge rules were 
> posted
> > in, or the documentation format for the LNX-BBC project at
> > http://lnx-bbc.org (we use an awk script included in the source
> > tarball that translates each .txt file into a collection of .html
> > pages).
> 
> Sorry to keep harping on my theme, but the problem with both plain 
> text and wiki (and don't get me wrong - I love the wiki concept and 
> am pushing its use in our company too) is that they don't create 
> truely structured data and, again, it becomes quite difficult to 
> convert to other formats.  The converse is NOT true - given an XML 
> document, one can quite easily create a text file or even a wiki page.
> 
> Lets make a long term choice and not a short term fix.
> 
> Derek

"Let's"? Whom are you addressing, Derek?  Piecepack High Command?
You're barking up a nonexistent tree.  There is no centralised
authority over the piecepack, which is in the public domain, unlike,
say, Icehouse (even if Looney Labs has as much right to their patent
on coloured plastic pyramids as British Telecom does to their patent
on hypertext).

You've also completely ignored Nick's point, which is that given
sufficiently intelligent parsing (with an awk or Perl script, etc.),
you can pull data out of almost any unstructured format with minimal
cleanup afterwards.  If you doubt this, I recommend you read the
recent book _Spidering Hacks_ published by O'Reilly, which discusses
scraping useful data from unstructured data sources on the Web in
great detail.

<http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/spiderhks/>

You're welcome to convert any games of ours (Marty's and mine) that
you see fit to XML; after all, they're GNU FDLed, and therefore freely
modifiable and redistributable.  I'll be interested to see what you
come up with.  However, in my opinion XML is an immature technology,
and I will not be spending any of my time (my scarcest resource) on
converting our games to XML in the foreseeable future.  

Thanks for your apology for harping on this issue.  I think most
people on the list now know how you feel about XML.  Perhaps we can
move on to a more fruitful topic.

Ron H-E

-- 
    Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... ... http://ron.ludism.org/
	 Center for Ludic Synergy, Seattle Cosmic Game Night,
Kennexions Glass Bead Game & Positive Revolution FAQ: http://www.ludism.org/