Zefram wrote:
What's wrong with XML. It's hideously verbose; it doesn't actually provide a representation of the data (it only provides structure); it has awkward corners that end up poorly tested; as it's a textual format it's subject to all the usual problems around character sets; the context encourages the use of forgiving parsers for the actual textual data representation, which leads to incompatibility; and it's a bad design in the first place because it tries to tackle too many classes of job.
Seconded. XML has a place in passing material between systems, but as a general store it's simply wrong. OSM was originated as 'xml' but the raw data is now in a binary file format to cut the flab. I am looking at creating an SQL database with the current data in, which can also then have a built in history of changes to that data. This will allow filtering in several ways, such as number of timezones on a particular date, and history of the 'creation' of data for a particular timezone can be displayed. Outputting a current clean set of data could then be in any format as required and providing a base to then hang the 'evidence' as additional records which can be displayed as html pages. -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk