VOTable alternative?

[Mark Taylor]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Guy Rixon wrote:

> One of the problems with VOTable 1.0 is that there is little support for the
> binary data format in VOTable-parsing libraries.  I.e., one can't find a
> VOTable parser that will start with an arbitrary VOTable and get to the data
> values regardless of the the data being in TABLEDATA, external FITS, BLOBS,
> streamed binary, etc.
> 
> This is because we have an overwhelming number of formats to be parsed.  It's
> Too Hard for the parser authors to cover all the allowed variations.  The
> implementations tend to be incomplete.

Guy,

The number of formats is large enough to be hard work, but not 
overwhelming; there are effectively five:

   TABLEDATA
   BINARY inline
   BINARY by-href
   FITS inline
   FITS by-href

I've been saying this for a few weeks now, but I really am just about to 
release a java library which will take a VOTable in any of these formats
and give you the data, without further ado.  Previews available on
request, I'm just writing overview documentation.  Public release
this month, honest.  Given that it's possible (and I claim to know
by construction that it is), I think this is a better solution than
what you suggest, since it means you can switch between VOTable encodings
without any application code changes.

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor    Starlink Programmer     Physics,  Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/