Talk:BeerXML

RfC: Has the article demonstrated notability?

• I have removed the RFC tag here as the issue is now resolved and according to guidelines. The statement and responses remain. Devils In Skirts! (talk) 13:23, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

The discussion at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/BeerXML has become circular with four contributors, 2 in favour of deletion and 2 against and no consensus. This RFC is for other contributors to discuss whether the page meets the criteria for deletion on the grounds of lack of notability. Devils In Skirts! (talk) 18:49, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

• I would be in favor of keeping it, but it needs MAJOR work, as it seems sort of long and has large sections without citations. United States Man (talk) 01:06, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

• It's really a rather ambiguous case; the sourcing is much poorer than the long list of references suggests as a substantial majority of the citations are primary sources or otherwise inappropriate for Wikipedia sourcing and many of the others do not mention BeerXML itself but are rather concerned with related/integrated technologies. That being said, there are a couple of secondary sources from noteworthy media that mention BeerXML, however tangentially. Honestly a very difficult case to judge. Snow (talk) 01:49, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Status Resolved

"The result was keep. A good example of why nominating articles for deletion when they are less than an hour old is poor form." Stifle — Preceding unsigned comment added by PrivateWiddle (talk • contribs) 23:49, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Root element for BeerXML?

Looking over the standard at BeerXML An XML Standard for Beer Brewing Data Version 1.0, it seems that the structure of a BeerXMl doc is an XML header along with one of several Record Sets: RECIPES, HOPS, etc. But the XML standard specifies that there should be a unique root element. While each BeerXML document may have a single root element, across documents there is not a unique root element. This BeerXML schema seems to have "beer_xml" as a root element, but that seems contradictory to the BeerXML standard. How is this resolved in practice? Is there a ref? Thanks, --Mark viking (talk) 20:18, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

BeerXML 1.0 is based more on SGML practices than on XML, so it doesn't have the same concept of a "root element". Just grab an element, any element, and use it as a root. The implied limitation then is that you can't mix both <RECIPES>...</RECIPES> and <HOPS>...</HOPS> in the same document. This seems to have been realised in later (and completely incompatible) versions of the BeerXML spec where they invent the <beer_xml>...</beer_xml> overall container.

I'm still unclear (owing to shortage of time to waste on WP) whether BeerXML 1.0 is XML (it isn't), a subset of XML (probably) or demonstrably incompatible with XML (not unlikely, but not confirmed yet). Also I've found a few other BeerXML versions after 1.0, but nothing seems to use them. The few apps that do use it seem to do so with custom parsers (and that's parsers, not just tools built on XML parsers). I think some even accept multiple root elements as well-formed. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:40, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your insights, Andy! I now better understand your earlier comments about its SGML origins. So in practice, it is a bit of a mess. I'll need to dig into the sources some more... --Mark viking (talk) 21:44, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

The idea of attributes / element content (under named elements) being interchangeable was common with SGML but hideous to work with under XML tools (RDF/XML made the same mistake). Andy Dingley (talk) 22:00, 22 February 2014 (UTC)