I sat down and read the DTD and the documentation and have some direct
feedback on it. I'm aware that the DTD is quite old, and some of the
ideas and solutions I'm going to suggest might not have been available
(or as popular) when the DTD was written. Lines starting with <! are
quotes from the DTD.
<!-- P is the Paragraph of HTML -->
<!ELEMENT P (#PCDATA)>
Referencing HTML in this way doesn't allow validation. Defining the
standard using schemas allow importing of concepts such as "Paragraph
of HTML" directly from an appropriate HTML standard.
<!-- Each Go file consists of one or several GoGame -->
<!ELEMENT Go (GoGame*)>
I believe it is a mistake not to have a protocol version number here.
<!ELEMENT Application (#PCDATA)>
<!ATTLIST Application format CDATA #IMPLIED>
It seems unfortunate that there is no explicit version number here and
no url link to the application website.
<!ELEMENT Date (#PCDATA)>
<!ATTLIST Date format CDATA #IMPLIED>
It would be great to define this in terms of a standard format (i.e.
ISO date format), since more than once I've had to infer the
formatting of a date an SGF file.
<!ELEMENT User (#PCDATA)>
The user tag is ambiguous, is this a person's name? a user name? a
user name on what server?
<!ELEMENT Copyright (P+)>
It would be great to use a URL here to the licence under which the
file is being distributed, for example, the creative commons licences
on a lot of web content these days.
<!ELEMENT Rules (#PCDATA)>
<!ATTLIST Rules format CDATA #IMPLIED>
Using a url to a ruleset here would be great.
Even better would be a machine-interpretable ruleset, but I'm not
counting on that anytime soon.
<!ELEMENT Black ((at)*)>
Using schemas allows the content of tags to be restricted. See also
discussion in the docs.
<!-- This is to take care of SGF tags, which are not translated -->
<!ELEMENT SGF (Arg*)>
<!ATTLIST SGF
type CDATA #REQUIRED>
<!ELEMENT Arg (#PCDATA)>
This introduces ambiguity into the file format, since it is
unclear what the precedence is. If the XML says one thing and the
embedded SGF tags say another, which has precedence.
cheers
stuart
On 10/22/07, Jason House <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> An XML alternative [1] to SGF has recently come to my attention. What do
> others think of this alternative? Personally, the effect of a tag affecting
> the previous tag seems kind of strange to me.
>
> PS: I found out about this from [2], a recently closed GoGui feature request
> to write more sane sgf files that contain the standard algebraic notation
> used in all GUIs.
>
> [1]
> http://www.rene-grothmann.de/jago/Documentation/xml.html
> [2]
> https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=489967&aid=1752711&group_id=59117
>
> _______________________________________________
> computer-go mailing list
> computer-go@computer-go.org
> http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
>
_______________________________________________
computer-go mailing list
computer-go@computer-go.org
http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
