[Openstreetmap-dev] OSM's Schema - moving it forwards.

Immanuel Scholz immanuel.scholz at gmx.de
Tue Nov 29 10:58:43 GMT 2005


Hi,

why you moved the discussion to osm mailing list? On purpose? Does the osm
users bother what the data transfered between server and clients look
like?


> I've always understood one of the key advantages of XML to be the fact
> that a human can read it, make sense of it and edit it in a text editor if
> need be. I write XML directly all the time (XHTML).

I can only speak for myself, but I cannot really "read" thousands of
lat/lon pairs and make a map of them in my mind without any futher tool to
draw them. I can look at the numbers and maybe remember some specific
values and search for them in the text file, but that is it and I will be
able to do this regardless of whether name is an special attribute or an
extra property tag.

So what are the benefits of using XML and why don't OSM use some other
format as CSV instead?

- XML does the encoding stuff. You don't need to care about sending , ; ä
\t \n or \0 within a string.
- XML does the validating stuff. The parser is much more robust about
version mismatches of client and server or broken servers or clients.
- XML parsers are widely available. Even a brainfuck XML parser is out there.

Human readable is a feature used mostly in circumstances where you have
data and want to structure (markup it like in HTML, but OSM has already
structured data and want just transfer it.

Ciao, Imi.






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