[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
At 9:50 PM -0500 1/16/02, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
>The formats aren't equivalent in information content though. Most CSV
>files *do* contain header information. Let's move from CSV to
>S-expressions. How about then?
>
> <person>
> <first-name>Gavin</first-name>
> <last-name>Nicol</last-name>
> </person>
>
>vs
>
> (person
> (first-name "Gavin")
> (last-name "Nicol"))
>
>I would argue that XML provides no intrinsic benefit over this.
>
The 1-1 onto mapping is more obvious here than in the CSV case.
However, I still think XML has practical benefits, even if the
information content is the same. Simply put, XML makes it a lot
easier for humans to match the right end-tag with the right
start-tag, and to find out which one's missing where when there is a
problem. This is not really an issue for machines, but it's very
important for human-generated and edited content.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| 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/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|
