Re: [xml-dev] Four fine text-based data formats ... liberate yourselffro

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

On 3/24/13 7:07 PM, David Lee wrote:
> This thread is really getting really unintelligible to me but hey
> that's why I subscribe.  Its good to have my brain hurt. I will avoid
> commentary on the most  but I have 2 I can't help but reply.

xml-dev is an excellent place to get a headache, yes.

> 1) (Verbosity is the other common explanation.) <shameless plug> If
> you truly buy into this, or don't ! ... I would love you to put your
> 2 minutes where your mouth is and help establish some scientific
> evidence. Please visit http://speedtest.xmlsh.org
>
> I will be having a public crow-eating party with the results.  Not
> sure who will be eating the crow so stay tuned.  It could be me.
> Please help humiliate me in public.  Whatever it takes to get
> volunteers !

It's not about processing or transmission speed - rather, it's about the 
overhead of those _things_ stuck in the data, things which often double 
or treble or quadruple or otherwise inflate the size.

Sometimes it's typists complaining, but the more serious complaints were 
from people who simply had massive datasets and didn't want the 
overhead, whether that overhead was in (de)compressing them or in 
storing and transmitting them.

I started out trying to convince them otherwise, but by the fifth or 
sixth conversation with people who not only disliked the markup but 
distrusted the standards organizations who had told them to use it, I 
stopped.

They clearly had found better solutions in simpler text formats.  It was 
still, in some sense, markup - it just didn't look anything like XML.

Thanks,
-- 
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/