Re: [xml-dev] Serialization of XDM

[Michael Ludwig <mlu@as-guides.com>]

David A. Lee schrieb:
> I'm dual-posting this because I think it is relevant to XML in
> general, but perhaps more so to xquery

Not a good idea when starting a discussion, because typically, no one
list will get the full discussion. I think I would rather have posted
pointer mails to other lists.

> There is no standard or even 'community accepted' way of serializing
> XDM

Isn't XDM predicated on the existence of an in-memory representation?
Aren't node IDs just an abstraction for pointers to memory locations?

Isn't there a desire in XDM to get away from the nitty-gritty XML syntax
details and join the realm of programming languages and their data
structures living in memory?

So when thinking about serializing this, why in God's name use XML?

Using a special XDM deserialization appliction to parse an XML document
representing an in-memory representation (a) of the result of parsing
another XML file into XDM or (b) of the result of an XSLT or XQuery
execution, or (c) the equivalent in low-level code in Java or C using
an XSLT/XQuery implementation, somehow strikes me as odd.

In many cases, will it not be less efficient to start the XDM/XML
deserialization than to repeat the process that produced the XDM in
the first place?

In all cases, will it not be more efficient to just use some
run-of-the-mill serialization format? I'm sure plenty of those
have been produced to foolproof perfection throughout the decades.
I would honor those efforts instead of rolling my own wheel in
angle brackets.

-- 
Michael Ludwig