Re: Roadmap; future file format changes

--On Thursday, September 26, 2002 11:22:28 AM -0400 Dennis Boylan 
<dennis@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 08:52:57AM +0100, Ed Avis wrote:
> > I was thinking along the lines of
> >
> >   <channel>
> >     <channel-id system="RFC2838" id="ctv.ca" />
> >     <channel-id system="TMSID" id="913247" />
> >     <display-name>Channel 2 CFRN</display-name>
> >     <icon src="http://tvlistings.zap2it.com/tms_network_logos/CTV.jpg"; />
> >   </channel>
> I like this since it supports multiple qualified values....
Which channel-id appears in the programme stanza ? Either one ?


> > or as I mentioned before, not having the 'system' attribute but
> > including it in part of the RFC2838 namespace.  The reason to have the
> > id as an attribute rather than as element content is because then you
> > can add constraints to the DTD requiring it to be unique, or requring
> > <programme>'s 'id' attribute to point to a channel element.  (IIRC.)
>
> Keeping everything in the RFC2838 namespace means more parsing on the
> client end.
agreed, but you're already parsing xml, this can't add much :)

> > > Imbedding the tmsid in the channel-id means when someone else wants
> > > a different unique id associated with a channel, he can't have it.
> >
> > That's true, if we had two different requests one saying 'please
> > include the TMSID' and another 'please use System X' we couldn't
> > satisfy them both at present.  But right now, there's only one id that
> > people have a need for, and nobody particularly needs the numeric
> > zap2it ids output at present.
>
> Tivoguide would need it if it used XMLTV.
Your previous email said tivo uses TMSID as well. Why does this not
solve it for them ?

> > Later on we can change the DTD to allow multiple channel-ids, so this
> > difficulty is only temporary anyhow.
> >
> > The copyright change doesn't have to wait; as for adding
> > channel-id: well as I mentioned I'd prefer not to have both this and
> > the old 'id' attribute in the DTD at the same time.  I suppose there
> > could be a transition period...
> >
> > But at the moment I'm not convinced we need to do anything *in the
> > short term*.  For the time being why not just replace the existing
> > channel ids with TMSIDs.
If we can provide listings to all the replay/tivo hackers out there,
this opens the door for xmltv to a slew of new users. And smart ones,
the ones we like :)

> That works for Zap2it, but what does it do for the rest of the grabbers?
>         Dennis

This was my point an email or two ago. We/You need to figure out how to
work with non-zap2it grabbers in some way. Although the change above
makes it easier for someone to write a post-grab script that inserts the
corresponding TMSID's after the grab. The problem is, where does the
mapping come from and who's maintaining it ?

jerry