Re: [xml-dev] Serialization of XDM - Use cases / Proposal

[michael odling-smee <mike.odlingsmee@gmail.com>]

All,

I have been reading this thread with much interest. I don't think I
have much to add in terms of the serialisation format (save I would
personally prefer an XML format without having academic argument for such a preference). 

As an extension/example of use-case 5
- Provide a human readable output of XDM data - I thought that such a serialisation format could be to create standard XPath/XSLT debugging dump that could be more tightly integrated to the host language - e.g. using xsl:message, XPath
trace(). Furthermore a standard format could also give rise to portable
unit testing frameworks where assertions could be performed against the
XDM serialised form or provide a convenient way of saving mementos of processing state - as previously alluded to this could be useful in languages such as BPEL or XProc.

None of these things is impossible with existing tooling, I just think
this would change the ratio of work that would be done by the tools
rather than the application developer.

Michael Odling-Smee