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Re: Some Questions on XML and XML Processing

• To: "Ram Menon" <menon_dev@h...>
• Subject: Re: Some Questions on XML and XML Processing
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 08:43:19 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <BAY15-F52nW0kKIBXEH00061fea@h...>
• References: <BAY15-F52nW0kKIBXEH00061fea@h...>

At 3:06 PM +0530 4/9/04, Ram Menon wrote:
>2) XML is so verbose that it cannot be easily interpreted by a human audience.
>Why is it that there aren't two versions of an XML document - a 
>"direct" human readable representation of the XML content [ other 
>than using XSLT and making it readable], and another representation 
>for processing it, which is compact and available for fast 
>processing ?

Because two forms is substantially more complex than one. Plus, it's 
not at all proven that another, non-human readable form would be any 
faster than the current form. In fact, there's substantial evidence 
to suggest the opposite. Of course, by suitable cherry picking of 
test cases, you can prove the proposition either way. But in the real 
world, XML processing seems to be quite fast enough. That is it is 
rarely the bottleneck in a system.

-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

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    • From: "Ram Menon" <menon_dev@h...>

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