Foundation and Mapserver MAP file manag e tool

[Bob Basques]

Flavio Hendry wrote:

>>On 12/15/05, Gregory S. Williamson <gsw at globexplorer.com> wrote:
>>The readability of binary combined with the terseness of ASCII.
>>    
>>
>
>Frank, I fully support that. I hope old good mapfiles will stay. XML 
>would be a nightmare [might be an unqualified comment, but who wants to 
>edit around in that crap ... and editing works very fine for me, gives 
>me the most freedom. I LOVE MAPFILES!].
>
>ciao
>Flavio
>
>  
>
It's really a matter of the tools available for editing in my mind.

If you are happy with using VI and editing the Map files directly, they 
are fine the way they are, but if you want to expose the functionality 
without teaching the basics of MapFile parameters to someone else, as in 
an Online mechanism for editing (a Visual MapFile editor) then the XML 
is the way to go, precisely because of all the "crap" stuff in there.  
The extra stuff is what makes the automation very easy to do.

I'm still thinking about the statement regarding maintaining the current 
Map Files along with a new XMLish version.  Couldn't the two be kept up 
side by side for some amount of time with a sunset date being 
artificially set for the older version, once (most) everyone is happy 
with the new order of things?  There may even be ways of making the 
conversion fairly easy between the two, or even have two seperate 
MapServer interpreters that are options at compile time, or, still 
thinking about it as you can tell . . . . . I don't know the innards of 
MapServer well enough to be an authority on any of these suggestions, 
but someone else can tell me what would and wouldn't work.

bobb