Re: XML was RE: [GD-General] RE: A portable preferences library

[J C L. <cl...@ka...>]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 18:54:16 -0000 
Alen Ladavac <ale...@cr...> wrote:

> On a side note, this comment that "it is a HUGE ammount of work", is
> based on a wrong assumption. Their problem is that the design was
> wrong. If they went for generic binary format from the start, the work
> would be near zero. But I digress.

No, you missed the boat.

XML is an encoding format.  It says nothing about the data structures or
data representation beyond the encoding.  More simply, through use of
URI anchors and references there is little (nothing?) that can be
represented in a serialised binary format that can't also be represented
in XML.  

The discussion to date has on representing things like raw vertex data
in a highly abstracted XML form.  That has obvious and unpleasant
post-processing expenses.  If you don't want those costs, don't incur
them: encode your already post-processed system-optimised yada yada data
structures into XML.  There's nothing inherent to XML or binary data to
prevent that.  You don't need to design or write your encoding format.

XML is JUST an encoding format.  Well, it also happens to be a
standardised encoding format, but that's more of a toolchain and code
support issue.  At the end of the day where disk heads don't meet
platters the effective differentials are in the storage and parsing
overheads, not in the data structures.  The data that is represented is
arbitrary, and for systems which don't need random reads (XML indexes
badly) the performance differentials are invariably trivial.

This written by someone who doesn't /like/ XML...

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
cl...@ka...               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.