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At 9:50 PM -0500 1/16/02, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote: >The formats aren't equivalent in information content though. Most CSV >files *do* contain header information. Let's move from CSV to >S-expressions. How about then? > > <person> > <first-name>Gavin</first-name> > <last-name>Nicol</last-name> > </person> > >vs > > (person > (first-name "Gavin") > (last-name "Nicol")) > >I would argue that XML provides no intrinsic benefit over this. > The 1-1 onto mapping is more obvious here than in the CSV case. However, I still think XML has practical benefits, even if the information content is the same. Simply put, XML makes it a lot easier for humans to match the right end-tag with the right start-tag, and to find out which one's missing where when there is a problem. This is not really an issue for machines, but it's very important for human-generated and edited content. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) | | http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
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