Lacking a DTD, Cabrllo can be anything to anyone. Much confusion can (and
does) result. Tree innocently uncovered a case-in-point with the Stew Perry
contest. It is with the *greatest* respect for the Boring club and their
*excellent* sponsorship of a unique event that I use their event as an example
of the problems that the lack of a *Cabrillo* DTD can bring.
=========================
=== A DTD, a DTD, my ===
=== kingdom for a DTD ===
=========================
At first glance, Cabrillo optically appears to use fixed-length QSO: fields.
While there are many disadvantages to them, there are many advantages as
well...provided they are parsed as fixed-length records. Unfortunately,
lacking a DTD for robot authors to follow, they are free to implement parsing
in any way they see fit (and are within their rights to do so). There is the
rub.
It appears that many (most?) robots uniquely id data elements through space
delimiting. They see at least one space in a record as a flag that the very
next non-space character is the beginning of the next required data-element.
In such a system these three are different, and only one is acceptible:
http://www.kkn.net/~trey/cabrillo/qso-template.html
QSO: 50 PH 1997-09-13 1804 NJ2L FN12fr KB2DMK FN12
http://www.kkn.net/~trey/Cabrillo_v2/qso-template.html
QSO: 3799 PH 1999-03-06 0711 HC8N 59 700 W1AW 59 CT 0
http://www.kkn.net/~trey/cabrillo/stew.txt
QSO: 1800 CW 2002-12-28 1503 K7RAT 599 CN85 N0AX 599 CN87
If instead, the robot treated "QSO:" as a fixed length record, all three
"Cabrillo formatted" submissions above could have been accepted because only
data in the correct columns would be used with the rest being discarded (though
that second one has me a little confused).
Robot authors, please seriously re-examine the way that QSO: data is parsed.
All the best,
Ev, W2EV
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