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Re: Designing XML to Support Information Evolution

• To: "Roger L. Costello" <costello@m...>
• Subject: Re: Designing XML to Support Information Evolution
• From: Kian-Tat Lim <ktl@k...>
• Date: Mon, 17 May 2004 08:18:43 -0700
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <000201c43c1a$212cfff0$10395381@M...>
• References: <000201c43c1a$212cfff0$10395381@M...>

Roger,

> 1. How you structure your information in XML has a tremendous impact 
> on the processing of the information.
>  
> 2. Hierarchy makes processing information hard!  There exists a 
> relationship between hierarchy of information and the complexity of 
> code to process the information.  The relationship is roughly: the 
> greater the hierarchy, the greater the complexity of code to process 
> the information  (Some hierarchy is good, of course.  But the amount 
> of hierarchy that is good is probably much less than one might 
> imagine, certainly less than I thought, as described above.)
>  
> 3. Flat data is good data!  Flatten out the hierarchy of your data.  
> It makes the information flexible and easier to process.
>  
> 4. Order hurts!  Requiring a strict order of the information makes for 
> a brittle design.  It is only when I allowed the lots and pickers to 
> occur in any order that the flexibility and simplicity kicked in.

	I think you have just rediscovered the usefulness of
the relational model and normalization.  There's a reason
why RDBMS took over from hierarchical databases for this
kind of information and processing.  (This is not to say
that there aren't linear/hierarchical documents that fit
much better into an XML world than an RDBMS world.)

-- 
Kian-Tat Lim, ktl@k..., UTF-7: +Z5de+pBU-

• References:
  • Designing XML to Support Information Evolution
    • From: "Roger L. Costello" <costello@m...>

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