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- From: Marcus Carr <mrc@allette.com.au>
- To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
- Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 08:13:52 +1000
Don Park wrote:
> XML is very flexible and it is easy to convert practically any data into XML
> without significant loss of information.
The trick I think, is to convert information taken for granted by humans into
something more formal. Formatting such as indents need to be interpreted as
nested objects. Humans don't have a problem with this because they primarily
digest the information linearly - finding the ends of objects programatically
isn't always as easy. I think the conversion to XML is much more likely to result
in lost information than the conversion out.
> But because XML is so powerful,
> the problem of converting XML to other data formats is much greater than
> before and is bound to cause information loss.
If your XML is adequately designed, it should contain all of the information -
getting it out with something like OmniMark is trivial. It might be difficult to
render neatly in your output, but that's not an XML issue.
> So I guess I am leading
> toward using XML more as a data communication format and less as a data
> storage format.
I don't see that being any more true for XML than it has ever been for SGML.
> Just whining cuz I am not going to the XML Conference,
By the sounds of it, we're the minority group...
--
Regards
Marcus Carr email: mrc@allette.com.au
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