[fitsbits] Re: [iaufwg] FITS Registry Proposal

[Walter Jaffe]

I have to agree with some of the earlier comments that there should be a requirement
to describe the conventions in computer readable form, e.g. XML.  The "meta-conventions"
for this description can be supplied by us.  For me the main advantage of this
is that it enforces a certain level of consistency in the descriptions, i.e.
with a generic parser you can check that the number of NAXISn equals NAXIS and
all analogous definitions.  Secondarily it is then reasonably easy to write
generic "convention compilers" that can translate between keywords and column
names in the files and internal variables in C.., JAVA or other languages.
When we designed the ESO VLTI FITS conventions Bill and I did this all by
hand, and it would have been a lot easier to work from an XML description.

Walter