Karim,
I agree with you and I also like the
approach of the XMILE-wide style sheet.
Obs.: The
Open Data Protocol/OData
(another standard defined by OASIS
Group) has in its characteristics
the use of "dynamic RSS feeds", I really like this approach too.
Atenciosamente/Regards,
______________________________
Nelson
Borges
Application Architect
IBM GBS Application Services Brazil
E-mail:
Ramal: 846-1647
Telefone: +55 11 2927-1647
From:
Karim Chichakly <>
To:
xmile <>,
Date:
09/30/2013 01:02 PM
Subject:
Re: [xmile]
default XML value proposal
Sent by:
<>
The purpose of the default values is to avoid cluttering
the XML file with lots of attributes when the majority of objects use the
same value. This dramatically increases readability and also reduces
the file size.
The default values do not have to be implied. We
can define a XMILE-wide style sheet that contains all the default values
and we probably want to do this so we both are explicit about them and
have a single place to review them. It can also help the implementation
by automatically providing the defaults when attributes are added to the
spec.
It is true it would not hurt to reverse the sense of some
of the boolean values that now default to true. In the display especially,
these are (unfortunately) historic rather than carefully conceived.
Changing a "show" tag to a "hide" tag is pretty clear
and not a major change. I believe there are some cases, though, where
it may be harder to come up with a meaningful name. I am also pretty
sure that we cannot default numbers to zero in all cases, but we can look
into it.
As we think about these changes, we should also consider
the impact on converting existing XMILE models. Broad changes will
make this more difficult than minor changes.
Karim
On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 10:26 AM, Bobby Powers <>
wrote:
Hi folks,
I've been working on implementing XMILE and have run into
a few minor snags.
First, there is an idea that attributes have a default
value. I would like to propose that all default attributes for numbers
and booleans be 0/false. My implementation uses reflection to marshal
XML into structures - it becomes hard to tell if an attribute was explicitly
specified with a 0-value, or was omitted in the XMILE file in some parts
of the current spec. I think that changing options from, e.g. 'show_background'
(with a default of true), to 'hide_background' (with a default of false)
will make implementations easier and lower the cognitive load when visually
inspecting XMILE files. This idiom appears most often in the <display>
tags, but is sprinkled elsewhere too (such as an aux's flow_concept=true).
Without this, it becomes very difficult to build a parser
for XMILE without hand-coding the XML read/write.
I'll have more to share in a few days, but thoughts and
concerns about the above are welcome.
yours,
Bobby
