[ 02 Jan 03 12:18, Bill Birrell wrote to Jan Vermeulen ]

 BB> us no harm, and have begun to accept that they may have problems with
 BB> the coding,

Coding will not be a problem at all.  The only problem I foresee is broken
data converted from SLF.

 BB> to be proved. I'll put that down to missionary zeal. ISTR we had much
 BB> the same thing a decade or so ago with SQL, but that came to nothing,

SQL is a storage format not a distribution format.

 BB> nodelist. The other obvious reason is that all programming languages
 BB> support the format.

As with XML.. it's still text

 BB>     Now another very simple question - will the XML or HRN new
 BB> nodelist be shorter than the current compressed one?

No.  A directly converted one will be slightly larger compressed, and
significantly larger uncompressed (close to twice the size, thanks to all
the tags/field names).  Once the alternate format is the origin of the
data, it will get even bigger as people start putting more information in
it.

 BB> Of course I am also assuming here what has yet to be proved - that
 BB> reliable software to make XML nodediffs and to make use of them can
 BB> be produced as freeware.

I doubt many are interested in closed source these days..


-- Scott Little  [fidonet#3:712/848 / sysgod{at}sysgod.org]

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