> I like the format of the gridded table as it is now. It's quite
> similar to the way we do it in JSBSim. I had gotten into a discussion
> with a more hard-core XML guy recently,
> though, and some of the points he made seemed sensible.
> But, I wanted to get some opinions from others who are doing similar
> work. The answers are pretty much along the lines of
> what I expected - that is, there's not really any convincing
> reason to tag each data point.
The gridded text is useful for readability for those who like to
look in the XML code using a text editor. Readability that, for
all the rest of DAVE-ML items, is anyway disturbed by the verbosity
of the XML tags.
If you open the file with a general XML viewer the gridded text
is usually put on a single line. Tables are unreadable.
A tagged solution is terrible looking in the code. Viewed
with a standard XML viewer is a little better, but still not very
readable (columns will be listed one by one). Try for instance to
read the following with MS IE:
<Example>
<dataTable>
00 01 02 03
04 05 06 07
</dataTable>
<dataTableXML>
<tr> <td>00</td> <td>01</td> <td>02</td> <td>03</td> </tr>
<tr> <td>04</td> <td>05</td> <td>06</td> <td>07</td> </tr>
</dataTableXML>
</Example>
The tagged format can be useful if we want to process the XML
to convert the format (for instance in a HTML readable form).
Another thing that, for the XMLers, may result odd is the
different handling of values: for variables they are tagged
inside a specific attribute, for table defined functions
they are untagged.
XML is for exchanging data. The goal of XML is to identify
the relevant items of a set of data and give them a semantics.
We can't consider the same a table of n x m values and
a textual description. I'm afraid the "right" thing to do for
an XML format is to eventually go tagged (and, of course,
provide a viewer).
Just for the sake of discussion: I'm used to look in the code,
I stay well with the gridded solution :)
Giovanni.
