mapserver and XML status?

[Terry Brown]

What the status of mapserver vis-a-vis XML technologies?

Particularly for the mapfile end of things - I see the mapfile.dtd
in the source tree, but that seems incomplete.

I saw some comment about not wanting to introduce XML-Schemas
because the only open source tools to handle them require C++ (or
Java), and you don't want to add more dependencies to mapserver.

But it seems to me that XML components could be developed along side
mapserver without making mapserver dependent on them - e.g. a schema
for writing map files in XML with an XSLT translation to the current
ascii mapfile format in the mean time, so those who wanted could use
it.  I know it's difficult once you let XML get its toe in the door,
where to draw the line, do you fold a lot of documentation into the
schema, etc. etc.

Does this sound like something that might be useful?  I'd be up for
writing a draft XML-Schema with an automatic translation to a DTD as
a starting point.

Out of curiosity and strictly as an aside, do the cross server
interchange protocols (WMS?) use web services / SOAP type
technologies at all?

Cheers -Terry

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Terry Brown               Natural Resources Research Institute
Research Associate        5013 Miller Trunk Highway
tbrown at nrri.umn.edu       University of Minnesota, Duluth
Ph. 218 720 4345          Duluth, Minnesota 55811
Fax 218 720 4328          http://beaver.nrri.umn.edu/~tbrown/