Re: Re(2): [Keitaidata-devel] licence/xml/format

[Curt S. <cj...@cy...>]

On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Nick May wrote:

> "Help more than they hurt" means inheritence is good....

Oops! No, I'm the dense one. I meant it the other way around.

> > By that I mean that one
> >parameter in an XML file should drag in at least a dozen or so
> >other data items, and this should be used by at least half a dozen
> >phones.
>
> ah - ok so "imode1" might specify that it can handle all basic imode
> functionality. Imode2 might be the imode-html 2gen spec (animated gifs,
> etc) but would also call in the imode1 definition, imode 3 would indicate
> uin's... Is that how things should work?

Only if there's enough to make it worth sharing. My question would
be, what is the average number of phone descriptions you have to
look at to find the value of any random parameter? If you've got
to go through three or four files/layers every time, it gets old
really, really quickly.

I mean this sort of scenario, when you want to know how many colours
the screen has: look at F503i.xml, discover that it points to
FujitsuCommon3.xml, which points to FujuitsuCommonColour.xml, which
then states that it has 4096 colours. It's a waste of time; why
not just stick "4096" right in F503i.xml and save the hassle?

Consider also debugging. I go find out that my new F503iX doesn't
actually have 4096 colours, but has 65536. If it's in the F503iX.xml
file, I just change it. If it's in another file, I waste time
contemplating whether it's actually inheriting from the right thing,
if the Fujutsu inheritance structure is correctly modeled, etc.
etc. etc.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cj...@cy...>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC