XML would allow the data to be used without the software, making it instantly available for all the platforms not supported today
Yes, they could read the XML data, but these platforms can read the text data now.
Assuming they've already written the appropriately robust text parser that works with the tzinfo text format. With XML, that work's already been done (in spades).
Merely XMLizing the data won't make it much more available for time calculations, which is the goal here.
No, but it will open it up for other uses. When I was doing my work, the only reason I was bothering to port the parsing software was to extract the data I wanted and not because I wanted it to do any calculations for me.
From: Eric Ulevik [mailto:eau@ozemail.com.au] * right now, there are no good editors for creating XML
Not true. Win32 has about half a dozen good ones.
I don't use Win32, and I don't know of any free, portable XML editor (unless you count Emacs :-).
Actually, I've seen some killer Emacs add-ins for XML. : ) Chris