Tim Berners-Lee did a talk at TED about open, linked data, and even though the talk was a little weird, it was also sort of inspiring…
In short his point is this: Don’t just put your documents on the web, put your raw data on the web.

So for the next game I will release highscores-data as XML-files! (Of course I’ll also make a pretty website for all the people who don’t appreciate raw data as much as Tim Berners-Lee…) The cool thing about the highscores in XML is that everyone who’s willing can easily create his/her own highscores-site!

Now for the boring part:

The XML files are created with PHP5’s XMLWriter class. Since I couldn’t find a good enough example on how to use it, here’s one for you:

$writer = new XMLWriter();
$writer->openURI('myXmlFile.xml');
$writer->startDocument("1.0", "ISO-8859-1");
$writer->setIndent(true);

$writer->startElement("highscores");
$writer->startElement("record");
  $writer->startElement("rank");
       $writer->text("1");
  $writer->endElement();
  $writer->startElement("player");
       $writer->text("Racer1");
  $writer->endElement();
  $writer->startElement("countrycode");
       $writer->text("US");
  $writer->endElement();
  $writer->startElement("laptime");
     $writer->text("26.42");
  $writer->endElement();
$writer->endElement();
$writer->endElement();

$writer->endDocument();
$writer->flush();

This will result in XML-file like this.

I’ll post more info about where to access those files and how to use them once the game has launched…