[CQ-Contest] An Open Letter to Cabrillo Robot Authors [was An Opportunity for Cabrillo Improvement]

[Ev Tupis]

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.

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=== 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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