Re: [Psidev-ms-dev] mzML 0.99 remarks

[Matthew C. <mat...@va...>]

Angel Pizarro wrote:
>
> The count atts are required, so you can't just ignore them. Plus if 
> you do, then you won't be playing nice with other tools out there that 
> do use them. Meaning that:
>
I meant ignore them while reading, which is entirely possible.  Ignoring 
them while writing would not meet the spec.

> (a) all write tools must encode counts properly
Yes, and this should be very easy to do.

> (b) all read tools must check the count attribute's correctness since 
> (a) may not actually be true, thus completely defeating the point of 
> having this attribute in the first place.
>
I do not see how you come to this conclusion.  Read tools do not need to 
check the correctness, they can choose to parse whatever is there.  If a 
reader reads the count element for spectra and pre-allocates memory for 
<count> spectra objects, that's the reader's choice.  Readers don't HAVE 
to do that, it's just there for convenience.

> Simpler on everybody if we just get rid of it in these spots.
I routinely ignore count attributes in my XML parsers. Like I said, it's 
mainly convenient for human readability.  Otherwise, readers have to do 
a "find all" on the element type, which is also not very hard, but some 
might complain.

-Matt