Subj : human-readable nodelist format
To : andrew clarke
From : Micael Bulow
Date : Sat Dec 14 2002 08:49 pm
Okay, this is a bit old, but I just got the echo here so I'd like to give some
oppinions on the subject:
ac> Human-readable (HR) nodelist format
ac> For simplicity and ease of use a human-readable (HR) ASCII text
ac> file format was chosen (in preference to, for example, CSV [Comma
ac> Separated Values] or XML [eXtensible Markup Language] formats). Of
ac> course this does not rule out the use of (or conversion to) these
ac> formats for future distribution of the FidoNet nodelist or segments
ac> thereof.
This should be the other way around, if you ask me.
The nodelist is to be distributed and read by machines, not humans. The
base-format should be XML or similiar and then converted to human readable
format when so required.
It's my deepest belife that this should apply to all the standards within
Fidonet.
Otherwise we will still have the same problem as we do now to atract new
developers, who is not used to bits and complecated rules of spaces and
linefeeds.
Besides this, you need addons and special utils if you want to store the
nodelist data in another format (for example such as SQL). If you used XML as
the base-format, you would not need any utils at all.
Further on, the format will eventually be rewritten to XML in the future
anyway, so we might aswell do it now. =)
