Author: Andrew Wagner
Date: 11:45:04 06/10/04
Where we've been:
First, some of the benefits of XML were looked at. I think this is not too
hard for most people to see, if they think about it. You can doubt whether the
overhead is worth the conversion to XML (though I certainly don't), but there's
no mistaking the power of it. Schema validation, custom tags, easy parsing, and
so on make this a great technology, and a good fit for chess.
Secondly, though not a lot of discussion went into this (probably because
it was obvious to everyone but me), it was pointed out that we need to agree on
a single notation to support in the XML itself. The burden of supporting
multiple other notations should be carried by the GUI's, the scripts, and
whatever else parses the XML.
Thirdly, having said that, a lot of discussion went into what notation
should be used. I myself am leaning towards using coordinate notation. It has
the least overhead, and is the most internationally friendly as well. I think we
should stay away from anything that uses PNBRQK within the notation, and shoot
for as much simplicity as possible.
Where we're going:
I see two main aspects of this project:
1.) XML representation. We need to decide what the XML document should look
like, exactly. For the most part, this means just coming up with a list of tags.
But there are also issues like what we want to wrap XML tags around. For
example, do we want to do: <Moves>1.e2e4 e7e5...</Moves> or something like this:
<Moves>
<Move PlyNum="1" FullMoveNum="1">e2e4</Move>
<Move PlyNum="2" FullMoveNum="1">e7e5</Move>
</Moves>?
For another example, we can do just
<Game>
<Event>Blah</Event>
<White>Smith</White>
<Black>Jones</Black>
...
<Moves>
...
</Moves>
</Game>
or we can do something like
<Game>
<Headers>
<Event>Blah</Event>
<White>Smith</White>
<Black>Jones</Black>
...
</Headers>
<Moves>
...
</Moves>
</Game>.
Seems trivial, but these are things to think about.
2.) Parsing the XML. What scripts do we want to see? I've given various
examples here and there, but we need to start compiling a list. Just to get us
started, here are a few that I've mentioned: Fen list, EPD file (with some kind
of criteria for 'important' positions), Java replay board, PGN, crosstable.
Also, we should have a script that just provides a simple summary of the games.
E.g. Crafty-Trueno 15' 0" 1-0. Another thing to think about in this category is
what a tool kit for XML should look like.
So, let me know any thoughts, and I'll do some of my own pondering and come up
with some lists of these kinds of things, and post them here. And we'll take it
from there.
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