Re: XML

Gary D. Foster (Gary.Foster nospam at Corp.Sun.COM)
09 Mar 1999 10:14:58 -0800

>>>>> "MO" == Mike Oliphant <oliphant nospam at ling.ed.ac.uk> writes:

MO> Why XML? Let's be realistic here. 99% of users are going to
MO> just want disc title, artist, and track names. Not to mention
MO> that I don't want to have to write a stack-based parser just
MO> to be able to do disc lookup.

I'm sort of with Mike here on this one. While XML is sexy and cool
and you could do all sorts of nifty things with it, it's far better to
have a quick, fast, easy to understand and easy to parse format. Such
a format would _encourage_ developers to adopt the new DB code instead
of the old cddb stuff.

If you're going to go with XML, be prepared to offer precoded engines
to everyone that they can just link in to their player code with a
simple set of API's.

On second thought, that's not too bad of an idea. You could supply a
reference library (for _everyone_, not just the unix-heads in the
crowd) that used a standardized API and provided a precoded parser.

Ok, granted, I have only been on this list for about 5 minutes and I'm
not sure what's passed by yet (a bunch, based on the traffic I've
gotten in the last 5 minutes) so I might just want to shut up and
watch for a few more minutes. I think it might be a good idea,
though, if someone were to summarize the status thus far and put it up
on a web page somewhere so us newcomers could get up to speed.

-- Gary F.

-- 
"...Unix doesn't have a monopoly on good ideas, it just owns most of
them."

-- Alan Cox, "A Brave New World"