[mapserver-users] XML mapfile?

[Mike Haarman]

On Wed, 22 May 2002, Norman Vine wrote:

> FWIW  -  IMHO and AFAIK xml though an ASCII format and a very useful
> one at that,  was NOT designed to ever be directly manipulated by humans

*XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.*

That was number six on the top ten original design goals for XML.  You may
find this hard to believe but in my previous position I supported a
publishing system with over 400 operators editing (SG|X)ML in flat-file
editors with some tag completion and lockout features tacked on.  Some of
the hairier XML dialects (FRML comes to mind) are obviously not for hand
editing, but your typical document structuring definitions (mapfile.xsd
would fall into this class) are pretty reasonable.

Maybe its just me; I've been doing markup for ten years.  At any rate,
most distributions of XEmacs, including the one distributed with Cygwin,
come with PSGML and family installed and configured.  Point it at
mapfile.dtd and bang: a mapfile editor with tag completion, syntax
highlighting and validation built in.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Haarman                        Minnesota Population Center,
mhaarma at socsci.umn.edu              University of Minnesota,
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