Re: gEDA-user: PCB suggestion

[Daniel J Wisehart <dw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 07 January 2005 09:44, Evan Lavelle wrote:
>
> Maybe I'm being thick here, but what exactly would the advantages of an
> XML file format be?

The main point is that XML is self-describing for people reading the file, 
which makes backward and forward compatibility trivial compared to what we 
have now.  

If you look at the documentation for some PCB feature, it will say there are 
four arguments, but the the output file will have six arguments.  You don't 
know what the last two are, so you set them to zero when you add to the file, 
but that causes PCB to crash.

How do you write your own scripts to modify the file when you do not know what 
new fields mean?  How do you submit changes to the source when you do not 
know what fields you have to protect for older versions of the program?

Regards,
Daniel