[linux-dvb] Re: channels.conf syntax?

["Edward Wildgoose" <ed@wildgooses.com>]

> Edward Wildgoose wrote:
> >
> > <source>
> >         <name>hotbird</name>
> >         <type>sat</sat>
> >         <diseqc_protocol>1.0</diseqc_protocol>
> >         <lnb>1</lnb>
> >         <card>1</card>
> > </source>
>
> That nicely outlines the reason why many people don't like XML:
> It's hard to find the interesting information between all those tags.
> And to add insult to injury the tag names appear twice for every
> little piece of information. Emards proposal looked much nicer,
> but...

Yes, I completely agree.  And it's very verbose (but compresses well!)

However, I think that you can also use Attribute syntax to make it look like
"a=27" type stuff again?

I guess it comes down to whether you want to look at it completely
unformatted in an email, or whether you will be using an editor.  Many
editors, and even many web browsers will make it nice and easy to read, and
even allow you to expand and close sections.  This perhaps makes up for the
slightly unwieldy look

A lot comes down to whether *you* will be reading it or the computer.  Take
the VDR format for example, this certainly isn't too readable, but most
people are quite happy with it (well, *I* think it's adequate)

> I would prefer a relational model.

Depends exactly what you mean.  None of the ideas I suggested are properly
relational, but I guess the hierarchical view is somewhat relational, at
least to the extent that the data is not many to one.  Notice for example
how the programs "relate" to the  mux and the mux to the source.

However, we receive an extract of a relational database via an XML feed, and
whilst it certainly does work quite nicely, it feels pretty cludgy because
we have many to many relationships to model, and so we end up with multiple
XML files to avoid repeating data.  XML does downward hierarchies very well
though in general.

I personally don't think XML is particularly revolutionary.  At it's
simplest its just saying "Look heres a nice generic hierarchical file
format, with a defined way to start and end attributes definitions".  There
are loads of ways of doing this, and I think people waste a lot of time
discussing whether XML looks as pretty as some of the other ways.  The good
thing is that it's fairly standard and so there are loads of tools available
to fiddle with it.  The bad thing is that XML is pretty verbose and could
read a little bit better

...Tough call....  As someone else said though - lets see the colour of your
code...!



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