[mapserver-users] XML mapfile?

[Steve Lime]

Man, what a chatty list recently. A couple of things are clear:

  - XML certainly will have some role to play
  - nobody wants to see the current format go away anytime soon

That's good cause that was my plan all along. <g> If anyone has noticed
a crude mapfile.dtd has been part of the distribution for some time now.
I found it a convenient way to document the format. Clearly though
schemas are the way to go.

Anyway, I might suggest taking this discussion offline to another list,
perhaps mapserver-xml or something along those lines. I can request that
the UMN set that up for us. Sound reasonable?

Steve

Stephen Lime
Data & Applications Manager

Minnesota DNR
500 Lafayette Road
St. Paul, MN 55155
651-297-2937
>>> Mike Haarman <mhaarma at socsci.umn.edu> 05/22/02 21:31 PM >>>
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,
                                    537 Heller Hall,
                                    Minneapolis, MN 55455
Co-Architect, Programmer,
  National Historical GIS -- http://www.nhgis.org/
Maintainer,
  DDI Codebook DTD -- http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI/