Question on .rev file format

[Richard Gaskin]

Joel Rees wrote:

>>> Hmmm... good point.  Makes me even more nervous, tho
>> 
>> Why nervous?
> 
> Maintenance, as he said. With plain text and its variants, you can
> eyeball the changes, worst comes to worst.
> 
> Incidentally, keeping the source in XML should not necessarily require
> the use of many tiny files. XML tags are nestable.

What of images?  Base64'd in the XML?

If one has sufficient time between billable work there's certainly no harm
in the exercise of writing an XML exporter/importer.  But the efficiencies
of the current binary format are at least as great for Rev as with most
other commercial packages, arguably more so when one considers the workflow.

XML is indeed great for exchanging data with other programs, and the Rev
team have provided some very useful tools to make that easy and efficient.

Wen considering the same for Rev itself, however, it begs the question:
where do you want to take it?  What other programs will be able to make
useful snse of the Rev language and its closely-coupled object model?

If it's just for "eyeballing" you could probably write a reporter that
generates much more human-readable output than machine-centric
<xml><thepoint><item>XML</item></thepoint></xml>. ;)

More useful still might be a dif tool that compares versions of a stack file
and reports only the differences.

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site
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