[botmeister]

It appears that PMB's method of navigation should in theory be better than all the others. If this is so, then why not adopt his method as the standard? I suppose one problem will be that the method assumes a certain type of map structure is to be parsed, so it may not be universally applied - I may be wrong about this however. What do you guys think about this one?

As for using XML or not, it really boils down to knowing if using it will provide more advantages than disadvantages over other potential formats.

XML is an accepted standard format, and web browsers can read it and look for syntax errors. While this is true, many errors cannot be detected by a generic XML reader because the generic reader cannot do anything with XML other than verfiy that the XML syntax looks ok. The XML tags are all customizable and a special interpreter is needed to make sense out of the supplied XML code.

Is there a BIG advantage that XML will give us?

If I understood coorectly what XML is all about, it is clear the idea is potentially a good one because the basic infrastructure for defining new mark up languages is agreed on universally as a standard. However, any new markup language that is created out of XML remains useless unless a special reader is developed for it. For example the MathML(tm) specification won't help anyone unless a special reader is aquired and installed for your browser. If it is not installed, you won't get any thing usefull from it.

Essentially XML is about as much of a standard to web browsers as ascii/unicode is to text processors. The world has only agreed that a certain format is to be used, but what the content represents is up to the individual application.

So, no matter if XML is used or not, the only advantages we'll see is that a web browser can read it, and if a special interpreter is installed for the browser, the browser may be able to do something more with it.

Is having a web browser read and interpret the XML data something we want, or need?