From: John L. <le...@mo...> - 2006-06-24 02:24:45
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On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 06:54:10PM -0500, Maynard Johnson wrote: > I won't pretend to be an XML guru, so if anyone on the list has any > suggestions, fire away. One possible mechanism to use for referencing > elements is xpath, which is included with libxml2. However, the syntax XPath is for querying document structure, we do not need that. We only need references, i.e. an "id" based approach. > We got many comments, both on this mailing list and from internal tool > developers who are already developing some XML-based tools, that we > needed to minimize the size of the XML instances. We even removed the > "id" attribute from the referenced elements on the assumption that the > consuming tool could internally store the elements in arrays and then > reference numbers would simply index into those tables. Yet this is a very un-XML way of doing things. Look at the libxml2 API and compare approaches. It is very easy with 'id' and not very easy with an array. > Perhaps we've gone too far in the direction of minimizing the size of > the xml document. Feedback or suggestions from the community would be > appreciated. I would love to hear more from interested parties. regards john |