On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Tim Jenness wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jul 2006, Mark Taylor wrote:
>
> > 2. The UCDs in the Vizier table are in what are syntactically
> > comment lines according to SSN/75, so it looks to me like this
> > is human-readable-only metadata. It may in fact be
> > cds-readable, but I don't know if the relevant format is
> > documented, or whether it's a good idea to support it.
> >
>
> but they are parseable and easy to spot. Does Aladin make use of this
> information? Maybe CDS should be contacted to see whether this is an
> extension that they are intending to provide to allow tools such as TOPCAT
> to use a wider set of data.
I am not keen. Everyone and his dog has their own text-based
format for tables, some based on well-defined formats such as
CSV or TST and others not. Mostly they are not well documented.
One might argue that CDS are especially important and their
extensions should be supported, but one might argue that
about a load of other people too. Supporting all the text formats,
and their variants, could easily take a large fraction
of my time. This is basically the reason I've not done TST until
now, when it seems like there is a pressing reason for it.
--
Mark Taylor Astronomical Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK
[log in to unmask] +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
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