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Re: [ddlm-group] Data-name character restrictions - one last time

On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 01:18:20PM -0500, Herbert J. Bernstein wrote:
> The only problem with recognizing CIF2 files by the period in tag names is 
> that mmCIF and pdbx CIFs also use such data names.  Hopefully those
> files would have DDLm dictionaries early on, so that the presumption
> of using DDLm dictionaries for all CIFs with name using periods would
> be valid.

Well, of course. My point is just that there will be some subset  of
single-crystal users for whom the transition to a dot-separated form
of data name will cue them to the fact that they're dealing with a
"new" version of CIF that might have other changes they need to be
wary of. If that increases slightly their chances of editing their
CIFs correctly, it's to their benefit and ours (in the editorial office).

The subsequent discussions on this topic about "users" are certainly
relevant. Although David has drawn a couple of very detailed
descriptions of how computer software should be designed to facilitate
an evolutionary change to CIF2, in the real world people will continue
to create CIFs in all manner of ways, and there will always have to be
validation, normalization and remediation procedures to minimise error
and ambiguity (but I don't think we'll succeed in eleiminating them
completely).

The IUCr CIF archive contains known flaws - susceptible of
remediation, but we haven't yet dedicated the resources to do
that. Outside the IUCr world, there are all manner of creative "CIF"
files in the archives of other publishers, in laboratories and on
private desktops.

My feeling is that the best analogy currently for the CIF world is the
various HTML standards. I have responsibility for the IUCr web site,
and consequently create hundreds if not thousands of web pages. Yet as
a "user" of HTML I have only a hazy grasp of the distinctions between
HTML 4.01 Strict, HTML 4.01 Transitional, XHTML 1.1 etc., and so my
hand coding is certainly wrong in places; our site uses for historical
reasons incompatible features of different HTML versions yet the
individual pages are not properly labelled with their correct (or most
nearly correct) DTDs; and sometimes the machine-generated pages are at
best suspect, if not downright wrong. Yet, somehow, thanks to
forgiving browsers, toleration of alternative renderings by different
browsers, policy decisions to drop legacy support for some features,
and a dose of good luck, the whole edifice somehow holds together and
fulfils a useful function. It's not perfect - and not how you would
want it to be designed if starting afresh with a blank sheet - but it
gets the job done. Likewise CIF.

And it's worth remembering that - rather like HTML - CIF remains, for
the most part, pretty user-friendly. Most of what exercises us in
these discussions are edge cases. In practice, a careful reading of a
relatively short specification will allow anyone who pays attention to
detail to create fully compliant CIFs with rather little effort.

Regards
Brian

> =====================================================
>   Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
>     Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
>          Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769
> 
>                   +1-631-244-3035
>                   yaya@dowling.edu
> =====================================================
> 
> On Wed, 9 Dec 2009, Herbert J. Bernstein wrote:
> 
>> Personally, I would greatly prefer to allow all data names that do not
>> create a major lexer/parser conflict to appear in a data CIF and
>> only apply the strong restrictions to data names that appear in CIF2
>> dictionaries as defined data names (not as aliases).  -- Herbert
>>
>> At 2:40 PM +0000 12/9/09, Brian McMahon wrote:
>>>> I have one remaining niggle that I'd like to revisit before we put
>>>> this finally to bed. As has been mentioned a couple of times
>>>> recently, restricting the data-name character set does invalidate
>>>> syntactically many existing CIF 1 files (e.g. _refine_ls_shift/esd_max ).
>>>> We have discussed strategies for handling this, and I think these
>>>> are workable strategies, but will involve investment and hence expense
>>>> in workflow management in CIF archives.
>>>>
>>>> I understand the rationale behind this restriction is to simplify
>>>> future processing of data names in areas such as dREL
>>>> applications. The question really is whether we're choosing the right
>>>> trade-off in making things cleaner at that end of the processing
>>>> chain. I would suppose that a dREL or other application could ingest a
>>>> data name with dangerous characters, convert it internally into a
>>>> "safe" identifier that's used for all processing, and then restore the
>>>> original form upon output; but writing that intermediate layer of
>>>> processing is of course expensive (especially if there aren't readily
>>>> available libraries that will do this transparently).
>>>>
>>>> I suspect that some of the original proposed syntactic changes also
>>>> had the effect (whether by design or collaterally) of simplifying i/o,
>>>> data structure management, symbol table processing etc., but those may
>>>> have suffered in the subsequent revision exercise we've just been
>>>> practising. Given the consensus we are now approaching, would the code
>>>> builders now be prepared to incur the addition expense of handling
>>>> "dangerous" data names?
>>>>
>>>> I really don't want to spark off a long discussion on this - if a
>>>> quick round of response shows that there's no appetite to allow
>>>> the additional punctuation characters in data names, I'll accept that
>>>> gracefully.
>>>>
>>>> ***
>>>>
>>>> One last comment while I have the floor, though it is related in part
>>>> to the above question. A concern raised in the editorial office was
>>>> that there would be circumstances where users didn't know if they were
>>>> dealing with a CIF 1 or 2 ("users" meaning authors, perhaps resorting
>>>> to the vi editor - and we're imagining most of them are dealing with
>>>> small-molecule/inorganic CIFs). My supposition is that the IUCr
>>>> editorial offices would only want to use CIF2 seriously in association
>>>> with DDLm dictionaries, and that we would expect the revised core
>>>> dictionaries to use the dot component in data names to signal this
>>>> further evolution. So even a superficial glimpse of the middle of a
>>>> CIF would make it clear whether it was CIF1 or CIF2.
>>>>
>>>> Does that fit in with how others see this progressing?
>>>>
>>>> Cheers
>>>> Brian
>>> --
>> =====================================================
>>  Herbert J. Bernstein, Professor of Computer Science
>>    Dowling College, Kramer Science Center, KSC 121
>>         Idle Hour Blvd, Oakdale, NY, 11769
>>
>>                  +1-631-244-3035
>>                  yaya@dowling.edu
>> =====================================================
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