info/ZCatalog990722.txt

Today I posted to the incoming folder at ftp.gmd.de a new Catalogue of
z-code (INFORM and the like) games and programs, building on previous lists
of z-code games compiled (first) by Brendon Wyber and Neil Brown, and later
updated by Gunther Schmidl. I have added as many new or previously unlisted
games as I could find, and the Catalogue now includes a section devoted to
non-English games.

This new catalogue departs from Gunther's innovation of writing the
catalogue as a z-code program itself, and instead casts it as an
interlinked set of html documents. They are zipped together as
"ZCatalog990722.zip". I grant that this incurs a certain loss of
"universality", in that the html documents, created on a WinTel platform,
may require some fiddling to live happily on another platform such as Unix
or Macintosh. Quite the nuisance, really, but I take the position that the
inherent flexibility of html, particularly its hypertext-like capabilities,
convey enough advantages to make up for the disadvantages.

Still, differences of opinion are what make a horse race. For that reason,
the distribution file includes some extras. Most importantly, the data file
used to generate the Z-Catalogue. You will find it in the file
zfiles.dat. It is a simple, flat ASCII file, one record per line, fields
demarcated by the '|' character (x/070c). The comments at the beginning of
the file document the data format. The format is relatively easy to process
and work with using handy utility languages like perl (the one I personally
would recommend.) In fact, the entire suite of Z-Catalogue html documents
can be updated at a stroke when the data are updated using the (included)
perl program found in the file make_zcode_cat.pl.

The entry point for the catalogue is the document ZCatalog.htm for the
standard version using html "frames", and ZCatalogNF.htm for the non-framed
version.

Hoping this is of some use to the community, I remain

Very sincerely yours,

maab

Michael Baum, d.b.a. shubunkin@earthlink.net