[CREATE] SwatchBooker 0.5

[Jon Cruz]

On Jan 21, 2010, at 11:57 PM, Olivier BERTEN wrote:

> I first went from <RGB r="1" g="1" b="1"> to <RGB values="1 1 1"> simply because it was easier to deal with different color models the same way (you were talking about laziness ;-) )
> Then, as I wanted to add 6CLR (and more), it didn't work anymore since an xml element can't start with a number and I thought it didn't make sense to reinvent color tags as this was already a widely accepted standard. So I chose to simplify to <values model="RGB">1 1 1</values> which makes it also easier to parse and extendable to less usual color models.

Ouch.

There was discussion of this on the list, and it was pointed out that such collapsing basically nullifies most of the basic XML validation tools. Parsing is also made *harder* for most things using an existing XML parser library. "Impossible to validate" is one thing to try to stay away from. Much of that should be in the mailing list archive.

For example SVG has been criticized for it's collapsing of point data to a single string. There were many tradeoffs made in that decision, and some of the points of discussion might be good to look at.