Poker Hand XML

[Phil153]

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some questions that need to be answered:

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My thoughts (I'll post more later):

- should it be easily readable by humans?

Desirable but inconsistent with the other goals. If human readable and easy parsing for non-XML coders is the goal then instead of HM's solution perhaps we should just do away with XML altogether.

- does filesize matter? (bloated xml tags?)

I think text compression is pretty good for database storage. In terms of hand sharing, size does obviously matter. I'd imagine tag-bloat for well written xml would be 3-5x. I guess we could mitigate this pretty well with very short tag names and the use of seat numbers instead of names.

- do you want to automatically validate if a HH is in a correct format? (xml schema)

Yes, this is a big plus

- do you want to be able to create other forms of representation automatically i.e. BB Code, back to PokerSites-individual Formats (XSLT)

Desirable but not essential. I'd imagine a single xml hand format would produce plenty of these tools through the community.

- should it only support flop/turn/river games (holdem, omaha) or others too (stud, 5 card draw?)

All is desirable, but let's get something working first. I think previous projects have fallen flat because of the difficulty of designing a standard. I'm a great believer in starting with something and then extending/rewriting it.

- should it allow references to earlier defined info? i.e. one currency tag ($,€,t) on top and only numbers later or seat info earlier with Playernames, and later only use seatnumbers to identify players?

If we're using a full xml schema with everything tagged out then human readability and non-xml parsing is pretty much non existent. In that case, seat numbers would be preferable. There should be a single currency tag IMO whatever format we use. So I think earlier referenced info could be avoided.

- how do you deal with different information, order, detail in Pokersites own formats?

Parse to a standard. For example, pokergrader makes a good point on having the amount put in on each action. As for missing information, we need to define "unknown" quantities in the schema to deal with these problems, and keep a minimal set of information (cards, board cards, seating, action type, $ put in, won $). Everything else (such as all-ins, winning hand type) can be extracted from the hand by code.

- regarding the creation of real-life-hhs: how much typing do you have to do?

Not sure what you mean.

- does tag order in XML matter to you? (what JavaNut mentioned)

Yes, very much. For three reasons:
- It makes it easy to simply traverse the nodes to build up a picture of a hand.
- It allows the intuitive insertion of other information in its correct place in the hand.
- Not everyone knows or is interested in XML. For example, rvg says he founded a 60 million company and has coded for 10+ years, yet knows little about XML. Average developers have no chance. We need to keep it so that string parsing still works intuitively line by line IMO. This also ties in with human readability.