Could you rifle me off a copy too? I still can't really contribute, but I'm eager to learn, and have a few ideas bouncing around in my head.
I think a unified format would be a very good solution. It will be a very easy way to move data around from program to program for two reasons. 1) Cut&Paste. 2) You're moving human readable data around, so it's real easy to compare what you input to what comes out after the import process.
Plus, importing directly from native application formats is clumsy at best, for every app forever changes their formats. Maintaining support fror an app's import processes becomes exponential to the number of formats you wish to support.
An xml statblock format would be much easier for a computer to manipulate, but I fail to see the point in it. Why bother with XML if the same can be done with a much nicer looking human-readable format?
I wonder what value a distributed dll would be once the format has been specified. One that parses the input, and that a hosting app could then query using id commands to extract out the info. It shouldn't be too hard to make, but I question the usefulness of something like that. I program in C++/MFC, but I think most other projects are platform independent, so the library wouldn't be too useful to others...
Hmm...
