XML Interchange format

[Greg Marra]

Some comments, although I have not given the document a thorough read:

• Don't abbreviate things when possible. "Red" and "Blue" are better than "R" and "B". You're thinking very FIRST-centric, think abstractly.
• I'd like to see alliance/team have an optional "captain" attribute.
• Calculating scores from penalties is nice, but a luxury. Can we have a "final score" attribute that is required, and "unpenalized score" and "penalties" attributes that are optional? What happens if in the future penalties are assessed by giving the opposing team points?
• The "competition" attribute should have canonical names. "FRC" "FTC" "FLL" "VEX" "BEST" "OCCRA" spring to mind.
• What is done for date in other XML formats? RSS does this: "<pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:51:30 -0400</pubDate>", so is that an easy format to generate/parse comared to YYYY-MM-DD?
• Location is "e.g. "Phoenix, AZ, USA"". We're throwing away resolution with that. <location><street /><city /><state /><country /></location>?

We should give some serious thought to the representation of match numbers. "21" for Quarter Finals 2 Match 1 makes some sense, but what happens if there is ever a series of 8 ties and we go to game 10? The Blue Alliance represents this data poorly now.

That's it for now.