Create a standard file format for program guide listings

[zshall]

As it is currently, the guide.xml file is a quick-n-dirty translation of a TV Guide listings file. There are unknown columns like data1, data2, etc. which were set up since I didn't know what they did. For a one-off art project this worked well enough, but it'd be nice to create a standardized format that would be easy to generate so that this project and others can easily pull in and use.

To do this, we need:

• To define what types of information would be required / useful for program guide listings. At a minimum, this would consist of a list of channels and timeslots for each channel, but also features like icons for Closed Caption support, colors for sports vs. movies vs. standard programming, ratings icons (PG, R, etc.)
• Investigate modern enhancements we could add that didn't exist in original guide formats that could improve QoL. Things like links to videos, Twitch / YouTube / social media handles. Not all visualizations of the guide file would need to implement all features, but we could define them for implementations that do.
• Decide on a versioning system for which attributes are part of the format, and allow the format to be extended. If a user has a specific attribute they want to use in the guide that isn't part of the standard, we could have a prefix for extra attributes like x-my-attribute in the way that HTML headers are defined so as to not conflict with future versions which include features that may have the same name.
• Decide whether we want to use XML or JSON for this info. JSON is simpler to generate for sure, but XML provides better validation against any schema that we decide upon. It may be best to define all the fields and then make a codec for both JSON and XML, then pick from those once we've had a chance to compare the code.
• Standardize on data type formats, specifically dates and times. There are a lot of ways to define a date / time object (and the complexities of time zone offsets) and we'd want to find a way to serialize / deserialize across platforms, without being overly complicated to use.

There are likely extra steps I'm forgetting but I'd like to start the conversation here.

[zshall]

Decided on YAML as the format of choice. Implementing in version 2.