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Re: XML data interchange format: Flatter is better

• From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
• Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 09:49:34 +0000

> Michael Kay wrote:
> 
>> And for my next exciting revelation, I will announce the discovery of third normal form.
> 
> Hello Michael, I assume you are saying this: 
> 
> 	Flat XML does not adhere to 3rd Normal Form 
> 	design and therefore is bad.
> 

No, that's not what I was saying at all. I shouldn't have been so flippant.

By flattening XML you are doing something close to putting the data in first normal form. So I was simply observing that you seemed to be following the path of enlightenment that would soon lead to third normal form (and probably beyond, e.g. to RDF triples).

In fact, normalization has a lot going for it if you want to present a graph of data to a community of users with differing requirements on what subsets of the data they are interested in, and of course it helps to avoid the redundancies that cause update anomalies. But as a data interchange format (the title of your message), no thanks. Messages are naturally hierarchic, it's the one place in data representation where hierarchies really work well, we've been using hierarchically-structured messages to communicate for centuries, and that's why XML and JSON work so well in this role. 

Michael Kay
Saxonica

• References:
  • XML data interchange format: Flatter is better
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>
  • Re: XML data interchange format: Flatter is better
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
  • RE: XML data interchange format: Flatter is better
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>