Alain Picard  <Alain.Picard@memetrics.com> wrote:
+---------------
| wallacethinmintr@eircom.net (Russell Wallace) writes:
| > But for anything you want to store on disk for an indefinite
| > period, using XML is a Good Idea. For some of the reasons why, see:
| > http://www.longnow.org/10klibrary/darkage.htm
| 
| Either there is sufficient meta-data to make sense of the
| bits on the disk, or there isn't.  XML tags don't magically
| tell an application (or a person) how some field is to
| be handled.  For a digital library, for example, it'd probably
| be shorter and faster to include a full specification of the
| data format (in ASCII) on the CDROM and to highly compress
| the contents of the library.  
+---------------

Or if political considerations *require* XML somewhere, then write
that "full specification of the data format (in ASCII)" in XML and
include it on the CDROM, and leave itself the data in binary (possibly
even compressed, as you say).

+---------------
| Storing megabytes and megabytes of XML seems insane.
+---------------

Indeed.


-Rob

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Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
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