On Tue, November 17 1998, John Fieber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[ good points explaining why an open data standard is important for
users, especially in the Open Source context ]
|That said, for some applications, SGML is just a pain in the butt
|as a native working format for data. The data associated with
|GnuCash, for instance, is textbook relational database material
|and it is probably best to treat it as such for internal storage
|and manipulation.
I'll tend to agree with you that it might be a mess to deal with, but
it looks like gnumeric manage quite well. So it's true that a
spreadsheet isn't a relational database, but they still can handle
very large sets of data, so what's the big difference between that and
having a couple of tables with relations between them? Especially
that you can have Gnumeric's experience and tools to draw on.
I don't expect GNUcash to keep updating the XML file on-the-fly. If
the file is too large to contain in memory or you want to provide more
crash-resistance then maybe some sort of a hacked, binary,
proprietary-format checkpoint file is in order, but why not use XML as
the "official" format gnucash can deal with directly without extra
steps to convert?
|HOWEVER, XML is excellent for data transfer between applications
|or application modules and a lossles conversion to/from XML would
|be extremely valuable but requires some careful thinking about
|how best to package it. Think QIF only a whole lot more
|flexible.
QIF++ - that's the sort of thing I envisioned.
As for contributing - today I got first hints that there is a chance
I'll be able to find an excuse to move into CORBA at my main
workplace, making it much easier to learn the usefull stuff to help
with this myself.
Cheers,
--Amos
--Amos Shapira | "Of course Australia was marked for
133 Shlomo Ben-Yosef st. | glory, for its people had been chosen
Jerusalem 93 805 | by the finest judges in England."
ISRAEL [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- Anonymous
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