Author: Andrew Wagner
Date: 10:44:25 06/09/04
I wanted to respond to some common themes I saw in responses on this thread. 1.) Regarding the readability of the XML. First of all, one of the scripts I will write will convert the XML back to PGN. So there will be complete backward compatibility there. If you like the PGN format, you can easily transform it back to that. Secondly, remember that the idea of XML isn't to look nice. And let's face it: How often do you really "read" PGN? You may look at the first few moves of a game or whatever, but generally if you look at a PGN you're trying to extract specific information. In this case, you can quickly and easily extract that information by switching the transformation script to show whatever you're trying to extract. The idea is to stuff all the information you can squeeze into the XML file and let the transform scripts and whatever else is parsing it worry about all the formatting stuff. By the way, by the time this is done, I'll probably write my own C/C++ based XML parser with the idea of making it easily portable to other programs. Assuming the interest is there. 2.) Several have said that they dislike the algebraic format and would like to see support of it discontinued. I don't understand this. What makes more sense to me is to support both algebraic AND other notations. At least in the format. Then you can write your parser to do whatever you want. The idea is MORE flexibility, not less. For example, which is correct? "a2-a4" or "a2a4"? Is one really better than the other? I'd personally prefer to allow either, and let the transformation script figure it out. So a move might look like this: <Move PlyNum="3" Format="Algebraic"> <MoveText>Nf3</MoveText> <Time>1:02:33</Time> </Move> Or a move list might look like this: <MoveList Format="Algebraic"> 1.e4 e5 ...</MoveList> That's what I'm thinking, anyway. Of course, majority rules. I'm well aware that for this project to succeed it has to be what the programmers want, so I am very interested in any and all suggestions. Andrew
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