Problems with CIF BNF
Brian McMahon bm at iucr.orgFri Mar 16 13:39:46 GMT 2007
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> In general, it is better to think of CIF as a series of line-records > where trailing spaces is insignificant (i.e. Fortran I/O). Just to round off this discussion (for now) on the list, I should note that Joe is following up some of these technical points off-list with Syd, Nick and others. A general comment that I would make is that CIF is a living, if imperfect, system, and that many suggested improvements - albeit more elegant and/or efficient - could easily break existing applications. The software list on the current CIF pages is woefully out of date (mea culpa), but I'm in the process of revising it (and starting to rework the entire CIF site), so you will be seeing much more up-to-date content in the next few weeks. That's not to argue for complete ossification, of course. In the near future the CIF site will host a proposal for a development of DDL that will formalise methods-based dictionary-driven validation. Implementation will require some changes to the STAR BNF, and that could set the scene for introducing evolutionary changes to the CIF format. However, users will be reassured to know that the existing CIF format will remain as a supported archival format; and it's important to look at providing the communities with tools to migrate existing CIFs into any DDLm-inspired modifications that might evolve. Much of what is projected in DDLm goes beyond any existing XML schema-based validation, and it's important for software developers to concentrate on the potential of methods-based validation, rather than getting hung up on the detail of the CIF format. Brian
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