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At 2:52 PM +0100 1/15/02, Jens Jakob Andersen, PDI wrote:
>Hello all
>
>I think that it is fair to conclude now, that XML is _not_ any more
>selfdescribing than e.g. CSV files.
>
That's ridiculous. XML absolutely is more self-describing than CSV.
Nothing here has proven otherwise. Your claim is indicative of the
flawed binary logic that pervades much of the Internet. XML is not
perfectly self-describing. Therefore it is not self-describing. But
that's only a syllogism in binary logic. The real world isn't binary.
It's fuzzy. There are degrees of things, including degrees of
self-description.
No serious analysis of how XML is actually used vs. how CSV files are
actually used could possibly deny that XML is more self describing.
The possibility that XML tag names could be chosen randomly does not
evade the fact that they are not chosen randomly in the vast majority
of cases. The evidence that some (though far from all) XML
applications use extremely opaque tag names does not imply that there
is no meaning there, or that this meaning cannot be teased out of an
XML document by a sufficiently determined researcher. The need for
genuine intelligence to comprehend and make use of this meaning does
not make it useless.
In reverse, the possibility of using column names in CSV files does
not help in any way with the large proportion of CSV files that don't
use column names. That the rows of a CSV file can match the column
names doesn't help at all when they don't. In the real world, XML is
simply easier to work with than CSV.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001) |
| http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0764547607/cafeaulaitA/ |
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| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ |
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