Hello,
I dropped an email to Ryan Dancey a few weeks ago, and haven't received a
response, so I thought I'd throw it out here.
Is anybody working on a method or mechanism to make the d20 rules
machine-readable?
I have a perl script which downloads the HTML and RTF and puts out a textish
document, but without useful markup tags (like you could defined with XML,
for instance), it's pretty hard to organize the data in such a way as to be
easily accessible from a program. (e.g. being able to parse out each class
defined in srdbasiccharacterclasses and create a listbox with the name of
the character class and the related text).
I'm in the middle of doing 'goofy' things like assuming that if I get a <p
class="MsoNormal">followed by a <u> </u> tag, that that is a high-level
entry that I could put in a list box. I also process different files
differently: I assume the name of the file srdcharacterclasses* is
indicative of one thing, where srdmonster* is indicative of another. I find
the documents aren't fully consistent (and the behavior of an
RTF-converted-to-HTML file differs from a straight HTML file).
The OGL could endorse one standard method of data storage and display (i.e.
a reference set of XML tags associated with, for example, monsters, NPCs,
PCs, generic rules, feat descriptions, etc), which could make it easier for
websites to create a consistent set of data that people could download and
view and integrate into reasonably generic programs.
I guess what I would like to see is the data structured in an underlying XML
format (with DTD) which is available off the ogf website, and which is
presented as HTML through the use of a style sheet. That way, a program
could download the rules, and populate it's own data structures with the
absolute latest set of rules, and a person reading it would have exactly the
same text, but presented nicely (and consistently) for them. This would
avoid having to package up a new distribution every time someone makes a
change to the srd rules, and would avoid dual-entry (one for the 'human
readable' and one for the 'machine readable' data). Any suggestions or
thoughts?
As a side note, is there a better list on which to ask this question?
Thanks,
JRP
_______________________________________________
Ogf-l mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
