I tried the "Export Database to XML" option of jEmplode today, and found myself quite disappointed. My aim was to have something to which I could apply a DSSSL stylesheet, to get a little booklet for passengers to browse the playlists in a form more convenient than the player menus. It would be quite useful, particularly with several passengers who all want to choose music.

I couldn't find the DTD for it anywhere (and there's no DOCTYPE declaration), so ordinary tools that want valid XML won't work.

Geussing at a DTD, it seems that all properties of each entry are represented as #PCDATA content. This seems odd, particularly for playlists, which naturally refer to other entries. I'd expected to see ID attributes based on FIDs (can't be exactly FIDs as XML IDs can't begin with a digit), and playlist contents represented as IDREFS attributes, enabling us to use the built-in power of ID references rather than having to build our own dereferencers.

Obviously, I could deal with the above by some pre-processing Perl script, but I'd rather I didn't have to. So, who is using the current format, and where did the design come from? Are other people suffering from the same frustrations as I am, or is everbody happily using the DTD-less unstructured output we currently have?