[aprssig] RE: New Request for findU... Mic-E Decoding

[Steve Dimse]

On 12/5/04 at 8:03 PM Brian B. Riley <brianbr at mac.com> sent:

>I know you are planning to send this data out as a simple cgi request so
>people can make use of it as a text display in their own web pages. How
>about a cgi to send this stuff out in XML? Has there been a spec for APRS
>data in XML form yet?
>
Brad, N8QQ has done some work on XML and APRS (see http://xml.n8qq.com/aprs/).
Early on I toyed with XML (the only remaining product is wxxml.cgi) but my
personal opinion is that to this point XML is still largely hype. XML
represenation of APRS data would be more verbose and harder to parse than
current representations.

For example, say I was not the proprietor of findU, but I wanted to create a web
site that used the findU data to create my own web page. The following Perl code
is all I would need to extract lat/lon from find.cgi:

$page = `lynx -source \"http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?call=k4hg\"`;
$page =~ m/lat\=([\-\d\.]+).+lon\=([\-\d\.]+)/;
$lat = $1;
$lon = $2;

Any other APRS data on this or any other findU page can be extracted just as
easily. To do the same using XML would be far more complex...

Someday perhaps XML tools will improve to the point that there will be a
usefulness to it for something as narrow as APRS, but I think that time is still
a ways off, and for now XML is useful primarily to those interchanging complex
data sets.

Steve K4HG