Re: [xml-dev] Separate the data model from presentation and make thedata

On Sun, Nov 22, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Costello, Roger L. <costello@mitre.org> wrote:

Hi Folks,

Assertion: Accessing/manipulating element nodes is simpler, easier, and faster than accessing/manipulating text. An element-based data model is better suited to XML's strengths than is a text-based data model.

use this as your data model:

<living-room>
<you/><are/><in/><the/><living-room./>

Problem no 1. Although you might get away with the full stop you are going to run into punctuation characters that you can't have in an XML element name?

<a/><wizard/><is/><snoring/><loudly/><on/><the/><couch./>
</living-room>

and use the former only for presentation.

Do you agree?

In XPath 2.0 it is no great hardship to do a delimited tokenize to generate elements if you wish so your arguments in favour look a bit anaemic.

Now I have walked this walk before.

In order to minimize XML payload size and get indexing for free in eXist I came up with the idea of representing the keywords tagged to a movie with an element

<movie>

</movie>

rather than

<keyword>drama</keyword>

<keyword>action</keyword>

or the denormalised <keyword>drama action</keyword>

eXist was having none of it as they have a limit on the number of distinct element (or is it node) names you can have in a database which I very quickly blew and my data wouldn't load.

I ended up coming to the conclusion that a graph database was a better fit for what I was trying to accomplish.