deekayen: Yeah, the "RedHat is Linux" misconception bugs a lot of us, but it's a fact of life. After all, Linux broke quite a few rules and preconceptions when it entered the mainstream. One of the rules accepted by the general public is that an operating system is a product of a single company. Apple makes MacOS, IBM makes OS/2, Be makes BeOS, and so on. So when Linux started appearing, it was inevitable that a single distro would arise as the one people knew about. That distro would become "Linux" to many people. And, as most things in the States, the distro that won was the one that appeared the most polished and/or commercial (Quality is irrelevant to this process). We all know it's wrong, but being wrong never stopped anyone before. :)

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So I was looking at XMLBoard a couple days ago, and since I'd taken an interest in XML earlier, I pondered if a PHP forum based on XMLBoard's DTD would be worthwhile. Sharing the DTD wouldn't really gain anything beyond the ability to migrate a forum from one platform to another. Sharing a forum between two otherwise unrelated sites would be an interesting option, though.

XML for a forum certainly has advantages. The first obvious one that beats SQL hands down is that the relationship between messages, regardless of how deep a thread goes, are represented automatically. I like that. Another good benefit is the ease of searching. There are, of course, downsides. Random access isn't the easiest thing to do. And how do you lock the file when writing posts? Well, there's a small project to look into some time.