Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Kay-Uwe Kasemir <[email protected]> · Thu, 27 Oct 2005 11:36:54 -0400

On Oct 27, 2005, at 10:54 , Claude Saunders wrote:

I strongly support using XML over custom formats.

Well, I think every XML document pretty much _is_ a custom format.

There might be existing XML document types out there for "customer

address"

which are shared to some extend, with existing GUI tools for editing

them etc.,

but "control system runtime database" will probably be a new, custom

one.

Sounds like XSD might be better than DTD,
and I basically agree with using XML formats,
after all the archiver is about the only EPICS tool
that already uses them ;-)

But my experience so far is "well, why not XML?".
No SNS user has created an editor for the XML archive config files.
Nobody has entered my office saying
"Thank you for using XML, because now I can use style sheets
and all these openly available XML tools that make my
life so much easier".
Instead, all I hear is complains about the difficult XML

syntax, so everybody still prefers the old ASCII format & perl

converter.

Maybe users of future EPICS releases will be of a different mindset.

-Kay

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System