[CQ-Contest] A Plea to Cabrillo Contet Robot Writers

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Jan 8, 2007, at 6:52 PM, Ron Notarius W3WN wrote:

> May I make a small suggestion?
>
> GIVEN:  That there are contests out there that no longer require an  
> RS(T)
> report as part of their exchange (Stu Perry and the Pa QSO Party  
> just to
> name two);

Maybe it's time to revisit the Cabrillo format, in light of several  
years of experience.  It has a couple of obvious short comings, and  
it's not (to my way of thinking) cleanly extensible.  Both problems  
can be solved with a new log format.  And preferable something  
lighter than full blown XML.

While it may sound like a reversion to the dark ages, the venerable  
UNIX termcap database format seems eminently suitable to the task at  
hand.  It's trivial to parse (with free BSD code to do the job), and  
the data format is almost infinitely extensible, and in a manner that  
won't get broken by forwards or backwards compatibility.

If anyone is seriously interested in contributing to this  
alternative, feel free to drop me a note.

--lyndon