> Let me also speak up in favour of XML as a metadata language. > > There are free libraries to parse and manipulate it. > > There are many free tools to manipulate XML documents, markup languages, > style sheets, and more coming all the time. > > It lets this project move right to the question of what information > the metadata should contain rather than what format it is in. > > And, frankly, I rather like thinking of things in the Document-Object > Model...
I am pretty familiar with XML (and XSL in particular) since I have been using it at work quite a bit recently. It is extremely powerful, and very cool technology, but that reason alone is not sufficient to use it with Freenet. XML is useful when you want to abstract data, or translate data between different formats. Neither of these will really be of use with metadata. XML is a very powerful and very generic way to represent information - but it really strikes me as being total over-kill for the metadata language. I suspect that many people don't really appreicate what it means to fully implement an XML parser, and indeed why XML is so useful. For example, why on-earth would XSL (XML Stylesheet Language) be useful for metadata? If someone can provide a good case for why XML would be good for metadata specifically (and "XML is a cool technology" is not a good answer), then we will use it, but for the moment it strikes me as being like using a nuclear weapon to swat a fly. Ian. _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
