On Mon October 22 2007 18:24, Don Dailey wrote: > > On Mon October 22 2007 10:15, Don Dailey wrote: > > it also seems to be hard to write an SGF file without bugs. > > 20% of the games or 20% of the sources? 20% of the games could have > come from a single source.
from different sources. You can check it yourself. Most of the files came from freely available sources linked from here: http://www.u-go.net/links/gamerecords/ I modified GoGui to output non-critical warnings for this experiment. Usually it warns only about problems that could cause information loss. For example KM[] or KM[ 6.5 ] (with spaces) are both invalid according to the standard, even if a forgiving SGF reader will accept them. > So are you arguing that you should have no control over properties? Is > this a strength of XML that you cannot define properties in a flexible way? yes. Allowing everyone to add non-standard properties means that you cannot validate the files in a meaningful way anymore. Also, I haven't really seen convincing use cases for non-standard properties. SGF defines (more than) enough, even if some of them are a bit underspecified (like OT allowing arbitrary text, which makes this part of the time settings practically unparsable for programs). > That's the problem. The constant pressure to add more and more > libraries to do simple things in more complicated ways. I don't want > to link in yet another library to my code. its not about adding more and more. Its about selecting a few best-practice norms and conventions. XML is a standard that is used by a large number of projects and it handles problems on an intermediate layer that every complicated file format will run into. IMO, reinventing the wheel in this case is inferior coding practice. But I am not pushing for a new standard here. It was Jason who wrote the initial mail about the topic. Remembering earlier discussions on the list, it is not surprising to see the usual amount of XML hate mails. I simply wanted to support an XML-based file format in GoGui and I selected Jago's XML format, because it already seems to be supported by some existig programs: Jago, qGo, glGo (read support only?), GoSVG. The next major version of GoGui will also include a converter program that allows conversion from SGF to XML and backwards. - Markus _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
