What about a more human-friendly format?

[pombredanne]

I wonder if a simpler format would be better? Something like YAML for metadata and text and a simple {{mustache-style}} curly braces markup when needed? Eventually eschewing any markup of the format?

[bradleeedmondson]

I can't speak to YAML in particular, but I believe @myndzi, @goneall, and I had talked about formatting (presentation-layer) markup, with me asking whether it's needed at all. @myndzi's response was that it was, at least if we wanted to be able to present the license text in a way that remotely resembles the original license text.

Additionally, there are lots of XML tools that we can use to make the XML-format files more susceptible to human editing. I don't know that YAML offers as much in the way of strict validation. Perhaps you'd like to propose YAML as a supported output format, rather than the authoritative format for the master files?

[pombredanne]

@bradleeedmondson supporting multiple formats would not make sense to me.

On thing that I cannot understand is why adding markup to plain text license texts would be needed. Wrapping a the text in a <pre> if and when you want to display HTML should be all that is needed, or am I missing something? Especially when these licenses are available as plain text. This is likely demanding low value, high effort work that I have difficulties to find a good purpose for. Especially since the current markup is more or less but not exactly like HTML meaning it is not even usable as-is without a transformation.

[bradleeedmondson]

My understanding is that the XML is really intended for the "master" files, and those will be used to generate the supported formats (plaintext, RDF, JSON, etc.). You could probably add YAML to that list without much effort, once the XML format is stable. But I understood part of your initial comment to suggest changing the master files to YAML, which is something we'd want to get the entire tech team and legal team to weigh in on (and in a sense it may be a little late, so we'd want to look at the cost/benefit of transitioning). Once the XML is stable, the XML license list is complete, the tools to work with the XML are available, and the supported file formats are being generated, I don't think we'll miss the accessibility of YAML.

[goneall]

I've also thought of the master XML as more of a format internal to the legal team - not something that would be directly consumed by tools outside of the SPDX community. There is a tool that translates the master file format into 5 different consumable formats including JSON and HTML. If there is interest, we could add YAML with a modest amount of effort.

@pombredanne to answer your earlier question, we did spend some time discussing different format before going down this path. No one was a big fan of XML, however, the additional structure provided by XML to tag items like titles, copyrights, optional text, and variable text is what led us in that direction. @myndzi did quite a bit of analysis on the approach.

[pombredanne]

ok, so I guess I can close this then. Thank you for chiming in.

[richardfontana]

I deleted some comments I made because I think it would be more productive for me to open a new issue than rant here. :)