Ihe gave this as an example of a data format that is simple and is XML:
<thoughtProvoker name="Roger Costello"/>
I think a good measure of the simplicity of a data format is how much prose (ink) is needed to explain the format. Clearly not a lot of ink would be needed to explain the above format to an XML person. But if the person knows nothing about XML, then large amounts of ink would be needed; likely a substantial amount of the XML specification.
Contrast with this data format:
Jon Bentley Avaya
Brian Kernighan Princeton University
Paul Hudak Yale University
Explaining that data format is simple:
The data format consists of lines
Not simple at all, what is a "line"? Ending with U+000A, or U+000D ? Pairs of those, combined with U+0085 or U+2028 ?
Here is half a screenful of text just describing an end of line
are you sure that is not needed?
.
Each line contains two fields separated by a tab symbol. The first
field is the name of a person. The second field is the person’s
employer.
There are no tabs in the text I see (in gmail) just 4 spaces Either your client or the mail list or my client stripped the tabs, but that's what happens with under specified formats.
David
Ihe also wrote:
> Simplicity is good but if the data format (and/or its supporting ecosystem)
> is too simple for the application the work simply shifts to the application
> where it will probably be duplicated and subjected to multiple approaches.
What does this mean: "the data format is too simple for the application to work"?
As for an ecosystem for a data format, the neat thing about little languages is that it's easy to build little tools to support them. That is, it's easy to quickly develop an ecosystem.
Lastly, Ihe wrote:
> Simplicity is good but it can also be a one way bet at the outset from which:
> there is no upgrade path. So if you subsequently decide that there are
> structures latent in data you once thought was suitable to be treated as
> text you are going to have a hard time shifting a text based ecosystem
> to exploit that.
I think this is talking about enhancing a data format with additional kinds of data. For example, in the data format above, add the person's age:
Jon Bentley Avaya 61
Brian Kernighan Princeton University 80
Paul Hudak Yale University 62
From my (admittedly brief) experience with little tools such as AWK, such an enhancement would be seamlessly handled.
Thanks for the comments Ihe!
/Roger
