Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] questions, questions

[Ali A. <ali...@au...>]

* David Merrill (dme...@lu...) wrote at 18:09 on 30/11/00:
> On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 09:59:55PM -0200, Ali Abdin wrote:
> > XML is just the file format that ScrollKeeper uses to store its own "data".
> > Wether GNOME and KDE have an XML browser is irrelevant. The fact is,
> > ScrollKeeper could have used its own non-standard file format, or it could
> > have used the easily parsable XML file format (there are tons of XML parses on
> > almost all platforms, and it beats creatign your own parser for the format).
> > ScrollKeeper uses libxml to do its own parsing, so that does limit your
> > choices (but libxml is cross-platform, doesn't depend on any other libraries
> > (although it is part of the GNOME platform), and it is written in C (meaning
> > you can create wrapper APIs in other languages)).
> > 
> > GNOME has a file-manager called Nautilus (in development), in this file
> > manager there is a 'Help Sidebar'. This sidebar presents the documents
> > installed on the system to the user. Sun submitted a patch to make it utilize
> > the scrollkeeper XML file.
> > 
> > When you select an item in this Help Sidebar, /then/ the Help Browser starts
> > up and displays the document (based on the document URI).
> 
> You just contradicted yourself and confused me. If the XML is a purely
> internal data structure, why is Nautilus reading it?

Yes, I did contradict myself :) 

Its not really an internal data structure or file format.

It is an external one, and instead of devising our own, we used an easily
parsable existing one...XML. I mean if you really want we could use a fast
binary database, but I doubt people would appreciate that ;)
 

The real reason though is: To be buzzword compliant :)

Regards,
Ali