Re: advocating XML

[Vasileios Papadimos <vpapad@cse.ogi.edu>]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 08:55:00PM -0500, Frank Boumphrey wrote:

> Buy him a 'Sabot' to throw in his steam driven printing press.

Be serious. Do you know the cost of handcrafted wooden shoes 
these days?!?

An argument for XML versus comma delimited files, is that 
with XML you gain a degree of physical/logical independence 
for your data.

For instance, imagine that you have to add/rearrange columns to 
your comma-delimited format. This will most probably 
break any software down the line that has to parse your files.

With an XML encoding (and it can just be well-formed XML), software
that's interested in only parts of your data doesn't have to change,
and your data can evolve!

Regards,

Vassilis Papadimos.