Re: What are the problems with IDML? (fwd)

Once upon a time Doug Donohoe shaped the electrons to say...
>Which is what we have done (more or less) in our "debate" page:
>	http://www.identify.com/welcome/idml_v_meta.html

Which makes meta look quite a bit longer - mostly because of the, IMHO
unfair, line breaks after <META and between NAME and CONTENT.  That added
a LOT of lines.  

Otherwise, looks fine.

>However a couple of open questions:  
>	1) Which would you prefer to write as a user (after all, 
>	   it's the user we're trying to help!)?

META - I perfer using tags that validate, AND it is a very very small 
amount of aditional work.  Besides, we're looking at having tools doing
that, you put in the data, the tool spits out the tags.  I could write a
Perl script to do it.

>	2) Which would you prefer to parse as a robot writer [1]

Cacatenating tags together isn't hard at all.  As a robot writer I would
rather set it up to parse META and then have an config/rules file that
I can extend to use EVERYONE's tags.  That's a key - there is going to
be more than one way to do this, and if they are all META based it would
be simple to write the bot to pick what it wants using the same engine.
With other tags, not so simple.

>    If you are going to have to change your robot anyway, why not
>    consider using IDML format instead (after all an IDML tag
>    is not syntactically different than an <IMG> tag)?

Because I would already need to muck with META for the systems in use NOW,
it would just be another rule set for the bot.

-MZ
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Received on Thursday, 22 August 1996 19:16:20 UTC