xdxf format: visual vs. logical

[Ildar Mulyukov]

Hello, people!
Regarding "new" branch @github, one can see several changes. Among them is the <xdxf format="logical">.
What is the difference between "visual" and "logical"?
Best regards,
--

Ildar Mulyukov,

[Casey Jones]

See the standard's description [https://github.com/soshial/xdxf_makedict/blob/master/format_standard/xdxf_description.md]:

The format attribute specifies the default formatting for the dictionary and might be either visual or logical. The default format might be overwritten for specific articles as described below.

    In visual format, the articles are formatted visually and are intended to be shown by dictionary programs (referred as DP) as is without inserting or removing any spaces or EOLs. However, DPs may mark the content of some logical tags (like <gr> or <abbr>) with different colors.
    NB! Remember, that visual format is NOT recommended! XDXF is developed especially for logically structured dicts and the visual format was introduced only to be compatible with dicts converted from old plain-text formats.
    In logical format, the articles are not formatted visually and shells are responsible for formating them before presenting them to the user.

[Ildar Mulyukov]

Hi Casey, thanks for answering.

22 дек. 2013 г. 18:47 пользователь "Casey Jones" <colo...@gmail.com> написал:

>>     NB! Remember, that visual format is NOT recommended! XDXF is developed especially for logically structured dicts and the visual format was introduced only to be compatible with dicts converted from old plain-text formats.

That was the question: is the visual Really Not Recommended? And if so what's the practical difference?
My guess is replacing HTML formatting tags with xdxf-defined tags?
Then my question would be: are such a converters out there? The first pretender would be the
  makedict -i xdxf -o xdxf
but it doesn't seem to have this functionality.
Any clues?
Thanks!

[Lenny Soshinskiy]

I hope that my explanation of two types was good enough to grasp.

It is not possible to convert from visual format to logical, since there could be dozens of types of formatting and it's impossible to predict which features designate to a which tag inlogical XDXF.