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RE: Status of LDIF and Changelog?
Hi -
At 15:23 16/11/98 -0800, Paul Leach wrote:
. . .
>Also, because XML is being rapidly accepted for use in the Web, it is likely
>to be very widespread. I was at Barnes and Noble, and there are already a
>half-dozen books on it.
>
This isn't necessarily the best criterion for making something a standard
(look at all the books there used to be on SGML :-). If you could point to
half a dozen major implementations of LDAP that used an XML file format for
data interchange, that would be a good reason to standardize it. At
present, you can probably point to twice that number of implementations
using LDIF, which says to me that LDIF is the right thing to standardize now.
Having said which, I agree that XML is potentially a better basis for an
interchange mechanism - at least as regards textual data (I'm not so sure
how it would cope with non-textual values). It has nicer ways of delimiting
entries and handling attributes, and it can cope with non-ASCII character
encodings. It would be particularly strong for textual information if the
major word processors were able to work well in XML-native mode. This is a
hurdle that they couldn't quite jump for SGML, but perhaps XML is
sufficiently simpler that they can do it.
As regards transformation of data from existing 'phone books etc., XML is
at present much less easy to work with than the LDIF format. This is a
matter of the right tools being developed (I understand that there are some
PERL-based ones for SGML which probably work on XML also) and of people
gaining familiarity with them.
So perhaps there should be discussion on an XML format, leading to Internet
drafts and trial implementations, with a standard in prospect in a couple
of years' time?
Regards,
Chris
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