[TML] Traveller Software: common file formats?

[Tom B]

I second the suggestion of Schema over DTD. DTD was a good first try,
Schemas are a better second attempt.

To do good schemas means I think you have to learn XML Schema and maybe some
XPath stuff too. Certainly there are plenty of tools now capable of using
schemas and validating documents vs. a schema.

The trick with making a good schema is how to make it easily understandable
for less-than-computer literate end users. If anyone wants to be able to
customize it, and it has any degree of complexity (applies to a DTD as
well), then it can be a challenge to customize.

Of course, if you don't plan for the computer-less-than-expert to modify the
formats, then XML Schema is the answer.

I did some work on a hairy project that used XML + Schema + XSLT to generate
other XSLT and SVG. XML is pretty powerful, when you add in XSL Transforms,
once you understand enough of it, which is not the journey of a few days.

TomB

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 12:33 PM, Andrew Long <andrew.long at mac.com> wrote:

>
> On 25 Feb 2008, at 14:31, Peter L. Berghold wrote:
>
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > <snip/>
> > My first two thoughts were to use XML and create a set of DTDs for the
> > XML formats and/or use a SQL based database as a "back end" to the
> > libraries.
> >
>
> DTD's are good for a starting point for documents that are just going
> to be looked at, but they're not the best when it comes to using XML
> as a data transport. I'd have a look at XML Schema, which lets you
> define content types, min/max occurrences, 'enumerated' values...
>
> Any modern XML parser can be told to use a schema and validate the
> data to make sure that it meets the specification supplied, and to
> bitch if it doesn't. It's a steeper learning curve than DTDs but I
> think that what you get out of the end is worth it.
>
> Regards, Andy
> ---
> Andrew Long
> andrew dot long at mac dot com
>
>
>
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