jr conlin's ink stained banana

BBC America is showing Top Gear!

1,000,000 BC.
Tuesday.
Scrum -1e207.

"Og no like it."

"What? Why Og no like it?"

"It round."

"Yes, it supposed to be round. It roll that way Og no have to carry crap."

"It got hole in middle."

"Well, yes, that's where you put stick so Og can link up others and move even more crap."

"Og not know, Wheel. Seem like thing you make not really market ready. Og have better idea."

Thus the basis of the second engineering decision.

Mind you, i may be just extra cranky because i'm trying to figure out a way to do a half-way decent implementation of CalDAV using PHP that doesn't , and am spending some less than quality time with the iCal and CalDAV specification.

i get the idea. CalDAV's a service to use HTTP to send iCal events back and forth to a repository, and iCal is a way to define those events, but c'mon, could they make it just a bit more arcane?

Instead of using something like XML to define events, they use their own format that requires multiple state machines in order to properly process, where you can have stuff like

LABEL;ATTRIBUTE=ATT_VALUE:KEY1=VALUE1;KEY2=TYPE:VALUE WITH SPACES
 AND CONTINUED HERE
X-RANDOM-THING-WITH-ITS-OWN-RULE:VALUE THAT CONTAINS AN UNESCAPED:BECAUSE
 IT CAN BUT \" QUOTES \" ARE ESCAPED

What the hell, people. What. The. Hell?

Seriously, XML not arcane enough? JSON just too standardized? You decide on a completely bizzaro data description format because… because you had a particularly good batch of weed that week?

Yes, i appreciate that running on little devices where loading up something like expat may not always be there, but you're already tossing around a bunch of extra characters and relationships, just do the right thing. Realize that tiny devices have limits and build a simple parser that doesn't do full XML. Modern computers have more than 265K available.

As it is, i really don't like state machine processing. Call me new-fashioned, but i prefer event based models that don't have weird cross dependency resolutions or errors. State Machines died when Zork got replaced by Castle Wolfenstien.

What's even worse is that CalDAV wraps chunks of that weirdo state driven crap inside XML. It's a tease. It's there to taunt me. Oh, look, i really do know how to properly mark data for distribution, but just enough to tick of JR.

grumble grumble stupid formats