Re: Format of concatenated UCD's

Dear Rick,

On Jun 2, 2005, at 17:16, Frederic V. "Rick" Hessman wrote:

> Haven't heard any response to this message suggesting an alternative
> means
> of concatenating UCDs to permit their parsing by an XML parser.
> Here's a
> forward to make sure you all got it.
>
> No, we don't yet have UCD's operating under a schema, but we might want
> to some day and it will be much less painful if we make the switch now.
>
> As far as I can tell, there's no obivous reason for the present choice
> of
> separator.
>
> Rick
>
>
>
>> Up until now, it hasn't been possible to check the syntax of a UCD
>> list using
>> XML Schema: there's no way (yet) to express a list of elements
>> separated by
>> semi-colons. This is a shame, since it means that somebody else has
>> to do
>> this work - work which could have been delegated to the XML parser.
>>
>> Fortunately, XML Schema recognizes lists of elements separated by
>> white
>> spaces, i.e. not
>>
>> "phot.calib;src.class"
>>
>> but
>>
>> "phot.calib src.class"
>>

I'm not an XML expert, hence please allow me a naive (if not stupid) question,
to try to understand better your point.

If we write a UCD with a blank as a separator, does that mean that we are
going away from a simple string in favour of an array of strings/words?

What impact will such change have on the VOTable standard?

Thanks,

Alberto

--
Alberto Micol
ST-ECF HST Archive Scientist