Greg, Dave:
I have unfortunately not had the time to look closely at STIF (perhaps
hoping that the relative quiet meant that it had died....)
I dislike the basic assumption made in STIF:
That it is appropriate to define an international format that:
- Is intended to be "nearly human readable"
- Imposes special syntax on Norwegian dat fields ([]), which means
that you have to know when you start typing a line whether or not
you need to put Norwegian characters in there
- Does not allow at all the use of Norwegian in tag names.
(for instance, the Norwegian word for "birth" contains an O-slash).
I would much rather prefer to see an approach that either went all
the way towards being machine parseable (my preference: SGML....), or
went all the way towards being "special-looking text", such as the
Tab-separated-format that, I believe, supports a "charset" parameter.
Harald Tveit Alvestrand