[MUD-Dev] an idea..wondering if this has been done

[bruce at puremagic.com]

Joey Hess wrote:
> Well you're welcome to look at my DTD; perlmoo is also non-commericial.
> http://kitenet.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb/joey-cvs/public/perlmoo/doc/dtd.xml
> 
> There are some rather old sample databases using an older version of this
> DTD in http://kitenet.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb/joey-cvs/public/perlmoo/db/Attic/

So, I did and now I've lots of questions!

In your some of your notes, you mention having changed how flags work to
reduce space used by your DB.  Have you considered using the short form of
an empty element as well to save space?

ie: use <FIELD .... /> instead of <FIELD ....></FIELD> ?

You currently slurp in the full DB on startup from what I can tell.  Do
you plan on always doing this?  (I don't know much about perlmoo and where
you intend to take it.)

Your DTD describes your database format.  Have you considered using XML to
describe more of the your world model?  I saw some comments in your code
about not wanting to use XML for room descriptions and such.  ColdCore
uses a custom (compiled for speed) markup language in this case (and in
others) that allows for a lot of interesting things.  What types of
reasons did you have for deciding against XML?

I don't mean this to be an interrogation, so I'll try and stop now.

An interesting thing that could be done with an XML db format is to do a
web-based DB browser.  In an alternate life, I do purify work on Mozilla
(not work, just a hobby of sorts).  One of the mail/news guys at Netscape
(Alec Flett) wrote up a perl script to convert a purify log into XML and
then some CSS and JS stuff to make it browsable via Mozilla.  It is pretty
cool and can be seen at http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/purify/

The ease with which that type of thing can be done with upcoming browsers
and such are what were originally driving me towards XML, among a
multitude of other reasons.

If anyone else out there would like to respond to my questions within the
context of their system (XML or not!), I'd love to hear any answers.

 - Bruce



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