XGF - An XML Game Format (obsolete)

Here's a very early draft of XGF, an XML format for storing turn-based games.

Please note: this is a very early rough version. It is meant as a basis of discussion.
Do not use this in real applications! The specification is not final and will change without notice!

XGF - version 0.1 - 2002-04-07

XGF spec: ZIP file (ca. 100K)
HTML doc: Outer frame; Game of Go + basic types (>600K)
Sample file: xgf-test.xml (simplistic nonsense example, just to give you the basic idea)

Some points worth mentioning:

Many functionality is still missing, especially layout information similar to DG (Diagram) in SGF.
Link concept not final yet (links in comments and from markup there, but links inside game tree missing)
The structure tries to keep balance between human readability and machine readability. It therefore makes extensive use of substitution groups (a technique that's not too common otherwise). The current way of moving all core markup (e.g. tree structure) into the game specific namespace is also a result of this. I'm not 100% sure that this is a sensible choice.

As for the file format: I reckon it might be a good idea to compress XGF files into ZIP files. Not only does this take less disk space, but also could other related files be included (e.g. images for players).

Note: Previously on this page there was another attempt of mine to create an XML file format. It was called SGFML. I keep it around for historic purposes. It is no longer maintained.

Comments, proposals, criticism welcome.
Arno, <ahollosi@xmp.net>