[Foomatic] Printer driver UI [proposal]

[Michael Goffioul]

> > > My first idea was to put the XML data in comments at the end of
> > > the PPD file, as Foomatic did. This is compliant with PPD specs.
> >
> > It is only syntactically compliant with PPD specs. but this
> > way you could have any proprietary format and call it a PPD file
> > because you could hide all information as comments.
> > According to my understanding the PPD spec. describes a general
> > way how to deal with various printer capabilities.
> > Of course any printing system or application program (i.e. any
> > software which must deal with various printer capabilities)
> > must be able to understand the information which is specified
> > in terms of a PPD file.
> > Therefore hiding information as comments is not in compliance
> > to the intention (i.e. the real meaning) of the PPD specs.
> 
> I agree.  I have nothing against XML, but I don't think we should need to
> use both a PPD parser _and_ XML parser to build a user interface.  I am
> about to implement a very similiar interface in Perl/Tk.  I don't want to have
> to parse XML in order to extract this tiny bit of additional
> information.

Well, I used XML for several reasons, it's widespread, and many existing
UI has XML parsing capabilities, so you don't really have the need to
write a XML parser, but just to interpret it, as you would do if those
info would be described in PPD. But the format itself is not so
important, as long as everybody agrees on it.
As my first idea was to embed metadata as comments in PPD files, the
format could have been anything, and XML was the easiest (Qt has a
built-in XML parser).

Michael.

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Michael Goffioul		IMEC-DESICS-MIRA
e-mail: goffioul@imec.be	(Mixed-Signal and RF Applications)
Tel:    +32/16/28-8510		Kapeldreef, 75
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