Date   : Wed, 22 Aug 2001 06:14:04 -0700 (PDT)
From   : Thomas Harte <t.harte@...>
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE : UEF Specification 0.9

>  Free XML parsers are everywhere these days!  Why even bother with
>  lex/yacc?
>  If DOS is a concern, can anyone honestly tell me they care?  I was
>  relieved to see MAME and MESS dropping DOS as their main platform - MESS
>  even dropped DOS support completely.

Before about beta 6, DOS ElectrEm was the most popular flavour. The windows
version has subsequently overtaken it to the tune of about tenfold more
downloads, but the UNIX related versions still get only half the downloads
of the DOS version. Its probably because I, and hence my site, are not in
the Linux/web clique, but clearly shows that if I favour the interests of my
users rather than what I just assume to be correct I should stop supporting
UNIX before I stop supporting DOS.

I have yet to see a free XML library which wasn't either in Java or
Javascript or had large quantities of code dedicated to web browser
audiences, e.g. DOMs and internet retrieval protocols and so on. And anyway,
XML can be lex/yacc'd - most people cite it as on of the major advantages
over HTML!

>  INF files are a bit simpler than XML, by a couple of magnitudes. :-) 
>  But I get your point.  INF was decided upon for an immediate, simple
>  need, and was never meant to be extendable.

INF is also badly documented and confusing for the end user. With a game on
disc it could conceivably even not have a catalogue, forcing me to think as
I probably was anyway of the game being a one unit entity. With INF I
suddenly have to start dealing with many little files and half-implemented
'cheat' filing systems (which usually don't let you save your game) and
stupid things like that.

>  That was a very long sentence, which I'm not quite sure I understood
>  fully, but what would you use HTML for?  How can HTML tell ElectrEm
>  anything about a game?  HTML is *purely* a hypertext formatting language
>  - using it for storing anything else but hints on how a piece of text
>  should be represented on a display device, is suicide.  This lack of
>  adaptability between domains is exactly what XML (and its plethora of
>  related standards) is making up for. 

HTML can't tell the emulator anything about a game, but no-one has objected
to the target machine or ROM hints in UEF, so I assumed they weren't an
issue. Then the only things an emulator could have known about a game from a
UEF if it included the bits people don't like are inlay scans, documentation
and all the other non-media parts you would receive when buying a program.
Which can't be communicated to the emulator via HTML, but can be
communicated to the user.

For example, notice the prolification of links straight to PDF files from
search engines such as google.

>  I'm sure those of you unfamiliar with XML will cringe at the waste of
>  space these examples seem to represent, but try to imagine all the
>  benefits we would get with XML, 
[...]
>  It'd be nice if the entire emulation "scene" slowly
>  converged on a standard.

It'd certainly stop people coming up with in my opinion ill thought out and
confusing half-ideas like SSD/DSD/IMG/ADF/ADM/ADL and INF!

-Thomas





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