MOC ASCII well-formed or not.

[Pierre Fernique]

Hi Tom & apps members,

Concerning your comment on ASCII MOC on the RFC page,

> Maybe the former was just a legacy from MOC 1.0 where ASCII MOC was 
> less formal, perhaps intended for hand-crafted MOCs not intended for 
> serious use. With ASCII MOC now being formalized, can we remove that 
> sentence and require that ASCII MOCs must be just as well-formed as 
> their FITS counterparts? 

As an ASCII MOC is often written by hand (in a Web form for instance, or 
as an Aladin script command), it was difficult to insure that it is 
always well formed at this level. Is it an ASCII MOC, yes, but 
potentially not well formed (ex: 3/1-210) . So the tools which have to 
manipulate such ASCII MOCs must check before used. At the opposite, FITS 
MOC is always generated by a code. So there is a real interest to force 
it to be stored well-formed for accelerating the future reloads.

That said, you right that it is a little bit inhomogeneous, and the 
ASCII MOCs will be used in other contexts that just for forms and 
scripts. So we can considere that an ASCII MOC written by hand is not - 
strickly speaking an ASCII MOC (not serialized in a file) - and in this 
consideration -  extend the well-formed constraint to all serialized MOC 
formats (FITS & ASCII) by just removing the sentence.

How does it sound ?

Cheers
Pierre