Author: Andrew Wagner
Date: 18:34:30 06/08/04
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On June 08, 2004 at 21:11:07, Joshua Shriver wrote: >I've been working for a while using XML. >Guess my first question is why? > >PGN seems to encompass all of the info needed in a ASCII human readable way >already. Adding the XML tags would just add more bloat. 1.) There are some holes in the PGN standard. For example, one thing Bob pointed out in the email discussion is that there is no standard way to really deal with inserting annotations into game scores. In the XML version, we can simply define an <annotation></annotation> tag set, along with whatever else we want, e.g. <depth></depth> and <score></score> for computer analysis, and so on. 2.) The XML document definition a.) Can easily be changed and added to, and b.) Can be used to validate an XML document using any number of freely available (including some online) XML parsers. 3.) With regard to the bloating, I did a test on this. I took a PGN file with about 250 games in it. Ran it through my little PGN->XML converter, and compared the file sizes. It went from about 268 KB to 315 KB, about a 20% increase. I don't think that's too awful, given the increased possibilities offered by XML. > >As for engine developers I would think it would be a little more cumbersome to >add a XML parser (unless it's opensource and just linked to an existing one). I really don't see how this would be too much harder than writing a full PGN parser. Of course, for a .Net engine, this would be very easy, but I digress...:) > >If you wanted to create an online database of games, then perhaps XML might be >beneficial since it could be stored in a db, and just parsed out using Xerces or >the myriad of other parsers. > > >Not trying to be negative, but I dont see the need. I gladly will stand >corrected :) > >Sincerely, >Joshua Shriver
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