[bf1942] Linux server status update 2003-04-28

[ScratchMonkey]

--On Tuesday, April 29, 2003 4:39 PM -0500 kenk at shreve.net wrote:

> No one on the list besides yourself has
> seen what your XML is currently capable of, so all we can do is wait and
> see. I think it sounds like a great idea to use XML after reading the
> other messages in this thread. My original intent was to bring the HL log
> standard to your attention. It's there to reference and compare to your
> own ideas about logging. Maybe they figured out a good way to solve a
> problem you've run into.

Excellent point. Looking at existing practice often reveals useful tidbits.

Note that XML doesn't specify content, just structure. It provides a 
highly-extensible framework within which to encode arbitrary data. There 
are lots of existing libraries for parsing it, and the same data can be fed 
to different processors for different needs.

I looked at a sample HL log file and it looks like it would be very 
straightforward to re-encode it with XML. XML would be more verbose, but 
that's the cost of having a self-documenting extensible format. It's why 
compression would be desirable for any long-term storage or wire 
transmission.

Note that http://OpenOffice.org/ uses XML as its native file format for 
storing documents. To achieve a reasonable disk footprint, documents are 
actually stored as zip files of XML.

http://qstat.org/ has an XML output option, and I use that as an 
intermediate format before processing with the Perl XML library to generate 
buddy and server lists on my Tribes 2 website.