Foundation and Mapserver MAP file manag e tool

[Sean Gillies]

On Dec 15, 2005, at 9:10 AM, Bob Basques wrote:

> 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

Where were all you XML config people two years ago? ;)

http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wiki.pl? 
MapScriptXMLDataModelProjectProposal

cheers,
Sean

---
Sean Gillies
sgillies at frii dot com
http://zcologia.com/news