At 04:03 PM 10/22/2007, Markus Enzenberger wrote: >On Mon October 22 2007 10:15, Don Dailey wrote: >> almost impossible to write XML manually without bugs. > >it also seems to be hard to write an SGF file without bugs. >I recently run a test on a collection of about 5000 SGF files >from various sources on the web and more than 20% of them >generated a warning when reading with GoGui. The most frequent >problems are duplicate properties or root-properties in >non-root nodes.
What makes you think GoGui is right? Thought experiment; If you took a spec, any spec, and wrote a program to implement it, what are the odds that it would be completely compatible with my implementation of the same spec without rigorous testing? >Another problem I have with SGF is that it allows user-defined >properties. And your alternative is? If you don't allow user defined properties at all, either you will be ignored, the extra information will be shoehorned into other properties, for example by magically formatted comments. In either case you still have the same problems. Having namespaces solves nothing unless you have a central authority dishing out names for namespace. Absent a central authority that everyone respects, you still have potential conflicts from people using the default namespace or making up their own namespaces. >Think of resolving a conflict in a Go game file in your version >control system. If the file format was XML-based, a meta-tool >could merge changes like version control systems do right now with >text-based files. Do you want to write a different >conflict-resolvers for every file format? True, but against this consider that there already ARE a bunch of tools to parse, split, merge, copy, bless etc sgf format descriptions of games. Not to mention millions of game records in that format. Do you want to write XML based tools to replace all of them? Except possibly for XML parse/pretty print programs, I'm pretty sure there are no existing XML tools of interest to game development. -- This really falls in the category of distractions. If your goal in life is to define the ultimate document format, have at it. On the other hand, if you're interested in Go programming, forget it. Work with sgf, and get back to the actual task. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
