[cad-linux] Re: An open CAD file format
- From: Russell Shaw <rjshaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: cad-linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 16:10:17 +1000
Eric Wilhelm wrote:
>>The following was supposedly scribed by
>>Massimiliano Mirra
>>on Sunday 07 September 2003 12:36 am:
>
>>>I am a huge proponent or re-inventing (or even eliminating) the smile
>>>floormat.
>>
>>Sorry, I'm not a native speaker. What does `re-inventing the smile
>>floormat' means here?
>
> Just my pet-name for file-formats. I'm working on an idea to allow programs
> to assume that the data will tell them what they need to know instead of
> having to parse the data, perform some translation, make an educated guess,
> and then think that they know what they need to know.
That's what xml and xml-schemas are for. The main pain is that even if
your program can parse in a file properly using a matching schema, your
program will need as much intelligence as a real user to know what to
do with the data, unless your program already has the inbuilt functionality
to understand that data. In the xml, every data element should have an
attribute that specifies what programs (and versions thereof) can understand
that piece of data.
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