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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Flatter is Better (part two)
 On 12/2/2014 8:50 AM, Peter Hunsberger wrote: +1. The thing is, you always have to ask "better? better for *what purpose*?" In your zeal to promote what you see as "simple", you have been consistently overlooking the purpose. And purposes vary.I really think you need to give up on this particular line of reasoning. In particular, your examples make it clear you're aiming this at data exchange, not documents. As such, there is no "better" as far as flat or fat. Better is determined by the needs of the data exchange partners and can vary by use case, network bandwidth, target device and a host of other constraints that do not allow for the kind of generalizations that you are trying to make. Rather, at best these recommendations are useless and at best they will lead to broken designs that do not fit any needs at all. Example: Microsoft Word binary files used to be (so I have read) essentially the memory image of the data. Word could read the bytes directly from the disk file into memory. That's why they loaded so quickly, even in computers that were very slow in modern terms. Isn't that the ultimate in efficiency and compactness? Yes, if you were only using Microsoft Word. Yes, if you had to read the files off a slow floppy disk, or over a slow network. No, if you wanted to be able to use Word files with many different programs. Also, normalizing data isn't really about "flattening" vs. "fattening". It's about getting the dependencies identified clearly, and removing redundancies. Depending on how you generate your interchange document, when you have redundant data you may end up with inconsistencies, especially after several rounds of revisions and extensions to the code. What is the recipient supposed to do in the face of inconsistent data? I think that everyone would agree that simplicity goes along with less structure. I value simplicity. But, as has been attributed to Einstein, "as simple as possible but no simpler". Tom Passin 
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