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Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2016 14:54:50 +0200 (CEST)
From: Roland Lutz <rlutz AT hedmen DOT org>
To: "Svenn Are Bjerkem (svenn DOT bjerkem AT googlemail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com]" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: [geda-user] New XML file format for schematics and symbols
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On Tue, 19 Jul 2016, Svenn Are Bjerkem (svenn DOT bjerkem AT googlemail DOT com) [via 
geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
> What will be the goal of this?

The goal is to have an alternative file format which has some properties 
which are desireable when working algorithmically on or distributing 
schematic and symbol files:

- Things which require gEDA code to make sense of (e.g., text objects 
which act as attributes, or overbars in attribute values) are stored 
semantically.  If you want to find the attribute called "refdes", you just 
have to look for an "attribute" tag with name="refdes" instead of parsing 
each text object's contents, discarding those with a space character 
following the equals sign, etc.

- Data is stored as XML, so it can be accessed on the web via an XSL 
transformation style sheet.  This way, the same schematic files could be 
rendered as SVG without requiring any server-side code, their attributes 
could be displayed in a table-like way, and they could be downloaded for 
editing.

- Symbol and pixmap files are included in the schematic file (unless 
specified otherwise), so you can give a schematic to your co-worker, and 
they can open it without having to worry about symbol libraries.

gschem can't handle XML schematic and symbol files yet, though, so there's 
still some work to be done until the XML file format is as useful as it 
could be.