[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Xml is _not_ selfdescribing
At 2:52 PM +0100 1/15/02, Jens Jakob Andersen, PDI wrote: >Hello all > >I think that it is fair to conclude now, that XML is _not_ any more >selfdescribing than e.g. CSV files. > That's ridiculous. XML absolutely is more self-describing than CSV. Nothing here has proven otherwise. Your claim is indicative of the flawed binary logic that pervades much of the Internet. XML is not perfectly self-describing. Therefore it is not self-describing. But that's only a syllogism in binary logic. The real world isn't binary. It's fuzzy. There are degrees of things, including degrees of self-description. No serious analysis of how XML is actually used vs. how CSV files are actually used could possibly deny that XML is more self describing. The possibility that XML tag names could be chosen randomly does not evade the fact that they are not chosen randomly in the vast majority of cases. The evidence that some (though far from all) XML applications use extremely opaque tag names does not imply that there is no meaning there, or that this meaning cannot be teased out of an XML document by a sufficiently determined researcher. The need for genuine intelligence to comprehend and make use of this meaning does not make it useless. In reverse, the possibility of using column names in CSV files does not help in any way with the large proportion of CSV files that don't use column names. That the rows of a CSV file can match the column names doesn't help at all when they don't. In the real world, XML is simply easier to work with than CSV. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | 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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