Quote:
Originally Posted by tylertoo
Thanks. Can I ask for specifics as to why you described this as much more intuitive than the old system. Is it because the entire world is contained in one file? Because the cities are contained within each country/state listing? Because its clear what the numbers mean? All of the above? Other reasons?
|
From my standpoint, it's all of the above, although there very well may be other technical reasons that Markus and Andreas took into consideration when choosing to change the format.
Granted, as I stated earlier, I definitely preferred editing the old text files (which I usually converted to csv or xls files to edit) simply because it was easier. However, there are some aspects of the new format that weren't really practical in a csv format. The most significant of these was including any field that had multiple values. Take language/ethnicity, for instance. If you listed 20 different languages for a nation, along with their percentages, you'd be taking up 40 columns just for a nation's ethnic distribution, not to mention all the other data. (And keep in mind that we will be expanding the amount of data included in these files over the next several versions, so we need plenty of room for growth.
)
I know it's going to take some getting used to, but I think the change will be beneficial overall. And once the web-based editor is released to the public, the editing process should be easy enough that you'll likely soon forget all about the old format.
