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.
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