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RE: Some Questions on XML and XML Processing

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Some Questions on XML and XML Processing
• From: "Stephen E. Beller" <sbeller@n...>
• Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 09:32:33 -0400
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <p06010203bc9c4a46fd85@[192.168.254.88]>
• Organization: NHDS, Inc.

Following up on Ram's questions, if one was to cherry-pick, what kinds of
situations would benefit from:

1. A document that is not written in a tagged tree structure?

2. A less verbose (streamlined) way to structure content, which (a) is
easily read by humans and (b) comes in a single version that is optimized
for rapid processing/rendering? 

3. The ability to parse into multiple documents?

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...] 
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2004 8:43 AM
To: Ram Menon
Cc: xml-dev@l...
Subject: Re:  Some Questions on XML and XML Processing

At 3:06 PM +0530 4/9/04, Ram Menon wrote:
1) Is the way XML is written[strctured, tree fashion] just because of the 
structured nature of the data it represents? Why was this mode of 
representing a document chosen in first place?
>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 ?
3) Why is it that parsing an XML file leads to only a single XML Document?

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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