Re: computer-go: SGF alternatives

[Nick Wedd <Nick@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Vlad Dumitrescu <vladdu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes

>I know SGF is now a wide used standard and thus not very practical to change 
>in a radical way, but what hit me this morning is that the tree structure 
>and all the properties and information is perfectly suited to be stored in 
>XML format.
>
>Could it be interesting to create a defintion file (DTD) for a game 
>description language? If not to replace SGF, then as an alternative...
>
>Against XML:
>- The obvious problem is that SGF is widely used and accepted;
>- the files would be larger;
>
>Pro XML:
>- there are a lot of XML parsers available, and tools;
>- it is a wider spread standard (generally speaking);
>- standard technologies exist to define how to view XML documents 
>(stylesheets);
>- XML is easier to read by a human; (may be only a matter of habit)
>
>Any thoughts?

Add:
Pro XML:
- there is one XML standard, and it is easy to understand.  There seems
to be a surfeit of sgf standards (or maybe it's just that programs don't
follow any standard), and many sgf programs cannot read each others'
output.

>    <MOVE color="black" where="pq" comment="interesting approach"/>
                                ^^
Ugh.  In the interest of human readability, _please_ use Q17, not pq.
This is how books and journals record Go moves.  Sgf's use of pq-style
notation is the main factor that makes it unreadable by humans.

Nick
-- 
Nick Wedd    nick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx