Fwd: Re: How long before services sending/receiving XMLmight n

I think you are still framing the question differently than I would. It sounds like you regard the data as a transient artifact, and the real value lies in the computation done at the origin end or at the receiving end in the present time.

But when you said, "governments currently require data or documents to be sent to them in XML format", I'm thinking of that data as a potentially valuable and long-lasting asset in its own right. 20 years later, someone in the government may want to read the second paragraph of the document you sent back in 2021, because it answers a question they will have then.

Right now, I am in an email conversation with someone about a community project I worked on in year 2000. I am looking through the archive of files and email that were on my computer 21 years ago to answer their questions. The data or documents I used then, I stored in the formats I was using back then. I did some computation (reading, editing, printing, discussing, whatever) on the content at the time, and their formats served that purpose. But they have a additional value now for what they can remind me about the old project. The formats I chose then affect the value of this content to me today. That experience teaches me to choose formats today that are likely to still be usable in the future.

Best regards,
    —Jim DeLaHunt

On 2021-11-13 00:50, Stephen D Green wrote:

Hi Jim

Isn’t that on an assumption that the data is persisted in the format it was exchanged? Wouldn’t it be more likely that the exchange format will be transient, deleted immediately it has been deserialised?

Regards

Stephen Green 

On Sat, 13 Nov 2021 at 03:10, Jim DeLaHunt <list+xml-dev@jdlh.com> wrote:

Stephen:

Your question below frames the choice as about serialisation options ("is there more reason to serialize it as XML or as another format"). I would instead frame the choice as about what kind of information artifact do you want to have: a pile of information encoded using XML, or using CSV, or using JSON?  I would make that choice in part with an eye to how long will that pile of information persist, and what someone might want to do with it 20 or 30 years in the future.

What I take from the conversation on this list is that if the information is encoded using the right XML language (and schema etc.) then it will be a more comprehensible, re-usable, and thus more valuable asset in future decades with future systems, than will be the same information encoded as CSV, or worse yet, JSON. I could be wrong about that. I'm not an expert.

But I do think that it matters how you frame the choice.

    —Jim DeLaHunt

On 2021-11-12 04:58, Stephen D Green wrote:

Given that systems typically hold data in some kind of code model before it is serialized to a final character encoded format required by the government such as XML, CSV (yes, right) or JSON, is there more reason to serialize it as XML or as another format such as CSV or JSON? Or is serialization to JSON so commonplace that there is little reason to look any further if given the choice? I could understand it if serialization to JSON poses a problem when the government puts necessary constraints on that JSON. Is the understanding of the practicalities of the possibilities for constraining the final, transferred data/document a reason to stick with XML? UTF-*, escaping, choices of alternatives in the text syntax, etcetera? 

On Tue, 9 Nov 2021 at 16:30, Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi XML Dev’ers,

Do you have any opinion on how long software systems communicating with each other (one-way or two-way) using XML might be able to continue to use XML this way? If, say, governments currently require data or documents to be sent to them in XML format, what professional advice would you suggest about how long would be reasonable before this use of XML should be replaced? Or do you think such uses of XML could reasonably be perpetual? 

Many thanks for your consideration.

Stephen Green

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Stephen D Green

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Stephen D Green

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Stephen D Green

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