Andrew, thanks for the detailed response. You've obviously thought a lot about this. For the reasons I gave, I would still recommend a new extension be defined. But I'd also suggest describing the use of ".xml", perhaps listing some of the pros (as you described) and cons (as I described) so that authors can decide which extension works best for them. What do others think? Mark. On 5/9/06, Andrew Miller <ak.miller@auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
Quoting Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>:
That looks much better, Andrew.
My only remaining comment (which I mentioned before, and Eric P concurred) is that you should pick a CellML-specific file extension. This has been discussed extensively by the CellML group, see for example *http://www.cellml.org/meeting_minutes/meeting-minutes-for-2005/meeting_minut... *http://www.cellml.org/meeting_minutes/9.3.2006/ The consensus of the group is that .xml should be the only official file extension.
We have several reasons for not encouraging anything other than .xml as the file extension: 1) We have used .cml (which conflicted with other markup languages, like Chemical Markup Language) in the past, and changed to .xml. Having a history of too many file extensions makes it hard to encourage software vendors to stick with a particular one. 2) There is currently repository software which uses .xml, and changing this will likely create problems for (some) client software using the repositories. 3) Many users of CellML like to edit their models as XML in a text editor. Using the XML extension allows this to work on systems which know nothing about CellML. 4) Using a specific extension encourages software vendors to rely on this file extension. Although all software developed at the Bioengineering Institute does not rely on a specific file extension, there is software developed elsewhere that will not open files which do not have a .cml file extension (even when the user specifically tries to open that file in the program), and I have heard that this is creating problems for users. By having only a more generic file extension, we encourage software developers not to use the file extension to determine whether they should open a certain file, and instead look at the MIME type (where available) and/or the XML namespace.
Best regards, Andrew Miller