[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Its the semantics dummy :-)
Jonathan Borden wrote, in the continuing saga - > Simon St. Laurent wrote: > > [Jonathan Borden]: > > >It is always > > >possible to send a perfectly well formed XML document that is totally > > >useless e.g. > > ><doc> <byte>67</byte> <byte>121</byte>... </doc> > > > > Uselessness is in the eye of the beholder, and MIME only takes you to the > > doucment container, not to its contents. 67 121 might be a very important > > code to me. > > The point being that this document is no less difficult to understand than a > pure binary document consisting of byte after byte. The fact that one > document is XML or the other document can be sent using base64 encoding over > text based SMTP makes no substantial difference (and one can quite easily > convert between the two formats). > > > Actually, there is quite a difference between this XML document and a pure binary one. In the binary one you have no idea about the structure - you don't even know if it's really supposed to be a series of bytes of a series of unicode points or what. In the XML document, you know that the data items are 67, 121, .... True, you don't know if they are string or integers, but that might not matter anyway. And this isn't necessarily trivial. I once wrote a program that ingested time series data, did all kinds of processing on it, and plotted the results. I wrote it to ingest one or two column ASCII text, to discover the number of columns, to discover which lines were comment lines (if it didn't start with a valid number, it was a comment), and even to learn whether the input was really a stream of binary bytes. Worked great. But I couldn't discover if I was trying to read a file with binary 16-bit numbers. I could imagine how to do it, but it was too hard to justify the effort and wouldn't have been foolproof anyway. If I could have inspected the files to find out the storage units, it would have been great. These marked-up documents are called "self-describing" not really because of semantics, but because the structural units are self-delineated. Cheers, Tom Passin
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