14 May
2004
14 May
'04
2:01 p.m.
On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 04:50:31 +0200, Alfons Adriaensen wrote:
I don't mind *IFF* the metadata file has a simple,
human readable
syntax (no XML please) that can be parsed line by line.
Human readable and line by line parsable are pretty much mutually
exclusive - try expressing any complex structure in Xresources. However
its easy to have a format which can be parsed line by line, and produced
from a human writable format.
One such example is RDF/NTriples, which is a simple ASCII format that can
be parsed with a trivial regex, scanf or similar. It can be generated using
commonly available tools from RDF/N3 or RDF/XML which are human
readable/writable. It looks like:
<foo:a> <foo:b> <foo:c> .
<foo:a> <foo:d> "e" .
...
Another solution is to use the xrm format, and then
you get the library
for free - it's part of X11 client library but independent of the graphical
part of X.
Yes, but xrm misses most of the desirable feaures of metadata languages
(agreed semantics, extensibility and so on). We could just use the syntax,
but its pretty complex for non-X11 apps that want to parse it.
- Steve