pcplantdb

[Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>]

Chad Knepp wrote:

> Richard Morris writes:
>  > >  > The API should *not* implement any particular markup or presentation of 
>  > >  > data whatsoever.  That is the job of client software and UIs ('front ends').
>  > 
>  > The question here is how to handle embedded hyperlinks in a block of 
>  > text. For example the reference question or a relationship. A simple way
>  > is to return an xml format text which does have markup, which is fairy 
>  > straigthforward for clients to work with (lots of standard tools for 
>  > this). The other option is to return some sort of collection object
>  > 
>  > 	results[0] "Here is a "
>  >   results[1] (Hyperlink,http://zip.zap.org/)
>  >   results[2] " in the middle of a line of text".
>  > 
>  > this makes me go ugh.
>
> Eden already has an very simple XML (KFML) that consists of a subset
> of HTML and includes a <link/> tag that can be any kind of internal or
> external link to be handled appropriately by the client.  KFML does
> not have a real DTD yet and is completely open to becoming whatever is
> needed.
>
> Related but seperate is the fact that the dataset itself is not
> currently XML'ized.  For now this just means that [39] will show up
> with no context to the casual user.
>
>  > >  > The API *should* provide ways to ask the data engine to
>  > >  > perform all the operations we can think of between a client
>  > >  > and the data set (and be expandable to those we haven't
>  > >  > thought of yet).  For example:
>  > 
>  > Argh, can make for a very complex server.
>  > 
>  > A good XML DTD could specify the API in a straight forward way.
>  > I've done stuff like this in other projects, and its got lots of 
> advantages.
>
> I don't agree.  I see the API and the DTD as different things.  The
> API shouldn't have anything to do with XML other than the fact that
> calls within the API return XML data.  Clients are solely responsible
> to render XML as they see fit.

Yes they can be different. But a client will need some idea of the XML 
being produced. Theres really two sort of markup presentation based 
markup like xhtml
<h1>Salix Alba</h1>
and semantic based markups
<LatinName>Salix Alba</LatinName>

I'm strongly in favor of the latter as it gives the client the most 
flexability for extracting the data items it needs.

There are ways we can make the DTD have future flexability. For instance 
instead of doing
<height>15</height>
do
<floatValue name="height">15</floatValue>
then if there is some new charteristic which we want to include say
rootDepth we can just do
<floatValue name="rootDepth">10</floatValue>
which will still fit the DTD.

I do not think we need to get the DTD fully worked out yet, although
I do have a few ideas floating about in the thing called my brain.
I can try and access it if the group so desires.

Rich