XML Interchange format

[Nibbles]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

Not mandatory, as some matches won't have been played yet. But it should be present if there are penalized or unpenalized scores.

"Find all teams from Connecticut." It's niche, but useful? I guess a string search can find that too.

I hadn't considered it to be used as a format for before matches, but that could very well be useful, if it is used as the format for a native XML database or something. How would you specify a match as unplayed? An attribute that specifies that might get redundant, since you don't usually look at the data during an event, but before or after, that would mean having to deal with a bunch of unplayed="unplayed" attributes. Is leaving out the score attribute enough to imply it is scheduled and not played yet?

If you want use that is any better then a text find, like "find all teams not in North America" (a query I have been interested in myself before) then even fine-grained, seperate country/province/city fields are not going to cut it. It seems like a dedicated API (Google Maps comes to mind) would be the best solution if you really need to interact with the location field. There shouldn't be too much difference between a simple string and multiple atomic fields, plus the single location attribute is simpler.

I added times for each match, something which I assumed I added but did not somehow. It is in "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss" format, local timezone (FIRST-specified time).

For names of matches and alliances, what case should be used? Lowercase seems to fit with me, just keep things ultra-consistent. "red" "blue" "elimination" "qualification" etc.

It was brought to my attention that I was having encoding problems, MySQL was sending the data in iso-8859-1 (apparently I don't want latin1_swedish_ci collation). I don't know much about character encoding, but I think I figured out how to set the connection encoding to UTF-8, the XML default encoding ("SET NAMES utf8").