Subj : Net Development
To   : Jan Vermeulen
From : Bill Birrell
Date : Thu Jan 02 2003 12:18 pm

Hey Jan,

 >     I take 'strine' to be short for 'english as
 > prononced by the Ozzees'. Am I right?

    Yes, it's the 'strine' way to say australian. :-)

    OK on the rest. While the penny has dropped that these people mean us no 
harm, and have begun to accept that they may have problems with the coding, it 
still has not occurred to them that in many places they are arguing in a 
circle, and in others they are assuming what has yet to be proved. I'll put 
that down to missionary zeal. ISTR we had much the same thing a decade or so 
ago with SQL, but that came to nothing, although it was a good idea at the 
time. That is one reason why we still have the comma-separated (St. Louis 
Format) SLF plain text nodelist. The other obvious reason is that all 
programming languages support the format.

    Now another very simple question - will the XML or HRN new nodelist be 
shorter than the current compressed one? If so, it will be cheaper to send on 
PSTN (or POTS) lines that still are not free of charge. If it is very 
significantly shorter it might become 'annoying behaviour' not to make it 
available to downlinks.

    Of course I am also assuming here what has yet to be proved - that reliable 
software to make XML nodediffs and to make use of them can be produced as 
freeware. I believe FTS or policy requires that there be at least one Public 
Domain freeware version. Others than the 'official' one may be shareware.

Best Wishes,
Bill.

---
 * Origin: Escan BBS (2:25/200)

.