David Megginson wrote:
 > In other words, you'd like     <foo></foo>
 > to be the equivalent of        <foo>true</foo>
 > or                             <foo>1</foo>
 >
 > I'm not sure if that's a good idea -- I'd be more inclined to default
 > to 0/false/empty-string.  What do other people think?

I'm of the same opintion.  The XML property syntax is, well, just
plain verbose.  This optimization helps a little, but not a lot, and
adds significant complexity to the specification.

The only change that I'd like to see made (forgive me if I've missed
an important point here) is to the array syntax.  Right now, you
define a property array:

/sim/foo[0]=A
/sim/foo[1]=B

as:

<sim>
  <foo n="0">A</foo>
  <foo n="1">B</foo>
</sim>

This works, but is a little clumsy.  Since multiple subtags are
already unambiguous to the writer, would it be possible to simply
define additional ones as defining the *next* element in the array?
That is, you'd represent the tree above as:

<sim>
  <foo>A</foo>
  <foo>B</foo>
</sim>

This makes for (IMHO) more readable/writable syntax.  It is also less
error prone: non-contiguous and non-zero-indexed property arrays
(which are almost always bugs) are now impossible to write, and
cutting and pasting is less dangerous -- the first <panel> in a file
is panel[0], etc...

Andy

-- 
Andrew J. Ross                NextBus Information Systems
Senior Software Engineer      Emeryville, CA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]              http://www.nextbus.com
"Men go crazy in conflagrations.  They only get better one by one."
  - Sting (misquoted)


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