On Wed, 05 Aug 1998 22:16:47 GMT, James Berry wrote:
>Have you ever tried to manage a word for windows document, with embedded
>excel spreadsheets? It would be a horrible format for a system to access,
>as well as being terribly slow.
Quite agree. Also puts everybody is the undesirable position of having
to have proprietary software, something we neeed to move away from.
>If you're suggesting one file per patient, why not use something sensible
>like XML? Easy to parse, although systems would no doubt need seperate
>index files in (whatever) format, but these could be generated from the raw
>XML files depending on the software used.
XML seems to me the way forward. The index files wouldn't be a problem
and sticking in an alta vista or excite type search engine is a doddle.
It is, like my good friend Gerard Freriks would say: the document
paradigm.
XML would put a completely different meaning on coding and
classification ;-)
>Remember also that Office 99 (or 2000?) will have HTML as a primary file
>format, which might impact this. Using Microsoft binary file formats _for
>portability reasons_ is silly as they change with great regularlity.
Using Microsoft binary file formats would be retrograde. I'd much
rather use something like PDF, author in page maker and port to html!
(much easier than Notes?)
This is, of course, for the interim only until we begin XML
experiments seriously, in which case, you'd forget the above ;-)
>Security might be an issue, if you would want patient data on your hard disk
>to be encrypted to prevent casual access using "notepad" or similar.
Again, XML and http security should prove to be valuable.
Ahmad
________________________________________
Dr Ahmad Risk
http://mednetics.org
home: +44 1273 748198
work: +44 1737 240022
fax: +44 1737 244660
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