>Why would we want XML? Really? What advantage does XML -- or an export to
>XML -- offer?
Politically:
- it shows we're not afraid to use "new technologies"
- it shows up as yet another feature on OpenCard's feature list
Technically:
- it's a good way to test any import/export APIs we might add to OpenCard
(if we add any, it's not a very common thing)
- it would allow to embed a stack into an HTML file
But I do not consider it a major feature. Surely nothing for 1.0, which is
*still* supposed to be the 100% HC 2.x compatible release.
>One might argue that XML allows other people to use our format and create
>their own viewers & editors, but--um--coudn't the just use the binary
>format, since it's public? And aren't binary formats easier--and
>quicker--for a computer to deal with?
I never said we should drop the binary format (I'm still debugging the new
compaction code), and I'd love if this became the new standardized xCard
file format. But XML has no byte limits, that is, XML doesn't need to be
converted when the application's internals eventually switch to support for
8-byte integers or whatever.
>And why can't you transfer binary formats? You might have to do some endian
>conversions, but--really--that's not so bad. I mean, really, it's SO HARD
>to swap a few little bytes, as I don't know of anyone who uses a different
>integer format. As for floating point formats, most of the world is
>IEEE-standard now; those that are not will need converting. And if you
>think those are hard to do, just think of character set conversions for XML.
I'm not an XML guru, but HTML, close in kin, only uses the international
ASCII set and escapes the others ("ü", for example), which makes
charset conversion unnecessary. But as I said, it's not a working format.
It's a lot easier to create XML files from HyperCard, though, than it'll
be to create our binary format. Chances are that all applications we'd want
to add importers for support read/write access to text files, but few of
them will have built-in support for binary file access. That's a good
reason why XML might be an option if we dont wan't to use MetaCard's SIF
(was that the name?) exchange format.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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