Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Thu Aug 12 06:58:50 2004

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 11:32, Hans Franke wrote:
> Am 11 Aug 2004 15:41 meinte Cini, Richard:
>
> > >>XML is platform neutral because it's basically ASCII, right?
>
> > Yes, true, but I think of XML more as a Web technology requiring a complex
> > parsing engine.
>
> Naa, XML parsing is as simple as parsing any other tagged format.
> You just start at the beginning of the data stream and wait for
> a tag start ('<'), identify the tab, and process the following
> information (until the closing tag) as needed. That's all. For
> my own little XML data storage I did an XML reader and writer in
> Applesoft Basic in a few dozend lines. That's all what's needed.
>
> Shure, if you want to do super-dooper-crunch-every-thing readers,
> then it get's a bit more complex, but these are not realy needed
> for real world applications (aka the ones realy getting the data
> from a media or putting it back).

Absolutely. There's a few gotchas, like if the opening tag ends with />
rather than > then you don't go scanning for a closing tag, and I seem
to recall having to do some strange things with character data fields
when parsing (plus there were probably caveats about escaping quotes in
attribute fields etc. - it's been a while)

Certainly nothing too complex though; error handling of the XML format's
probably the bit that takes most of the effort (coping with malformed
data without crashing the parser or eating up memory etc.)

cheers

Jules
Received on Thu Aug 12 2004 - 06:58:50 BST