RE: [xml-dev] Invisible XML 1.0 spec has been published

[Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org>]

Playing devil's advocate here ...

Invisible XML is all about converting a non-XML data format to XML. There are two problems with that:

1. There already exists a standard technology, with Apache open source tooling, to do that. It's called Data Format Description Language (DFDL). As best as I can tell, DFDL is 100 times more powerful than Invisible XML. Plus, DFDL builds on top of existing XML technologies -- XML Schema and XPath. Why reinvent the wheel, a weaker wheel at that?

2. From my cursory skimming of the Invisible XML specification, it appears that a user has to create a parser for the non-XML data format. If I have to spend the time to create a parser for a data format, I probably will also spend a bit more time writing code to process the parsed data directly. No need to introduce an additional step to convert to XML. 

/Roger