Subj : human-readable nodelist format
To   : Micael Bulow
From : Jan Vermeulen
Date : Sun Dec 15 2002 12:00 am

    Quoting Micael Bulow on Sat 14 Dec 2002 20:49 to andrew clarke:

 mb> The nodelist is to be distributed and read by machines, not humans.

    Not quite:
    the nodelist is written by a large number of humans
    the nodelist is composed and distributed by machines
    the nodelist is read by humans and machines

 mb> The base-format should be XML or similiar and then converted to human
 mb> readable format when so required.

    The cost of transfer of ZIPped XML over phone lines is 1.23 times the cost 
of the same ZIPped file in ASCII style.

 mb> It's my deepest belife that this should apply to all the standards
 mb> within Fidonet.

    You will have understood that I beg to defer.

 mb> Otherwise we will still have the same problem as we do now to atract
 mb> new developers, who is not used to bits and complecated rules of
 mb> spaces and linefeeds.

    Are you really saying that those developers are unable to write letters? I 
for me can not read something else in the phrase.

 mb> Besides this, you need addons and special utils if you want to store
 mb> the nodelist data in another format (for example such as SQL). If you
 mb> used XML as the base-format, you would not need any utils at all.

    Now that is interesting: I can give the XML format to my mailer and it will 
work rightway, without any utilities?

 mb> Further on, the format will eventually be rewritten to XML in the
 mb> future anyway, so we might aswell do it now. =)

    Oh dear...

    -=<[ JV ]>=-

 
* Origin: The Poor Man's Workstation -- Wormerveer NL (2:280/100)

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