Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
> What (authoritative) source gave you the impression that XML is > only, or even primarily, an "interchange" format? It started > life as "SGML for the Web", and SGML is not primarily an > interchange format. Its usefulness as an interchange format > is alluded to in the XML 1.0 spec, IIRC, but not stressed. I think that many of the design decisions in XML (and SGML) can only be justified by considering it primarily as an interchange format. No-one designing a storage format, for example, would have designed it so that you can't locate an element by ID except by reading the file serially from the beginning. That's why XML databases, even native XML databases, don't actually store XML: they store a representation of the XML InfoSet optimized for storage and retrieval. I generally argue that XML is designed primarily for information interchange, and that the requirement for storage is secondary: it arises whenever there is a time-lapse between someone writing the message and someone else wanting to read it. Messages are stored only to facilitate interchange. Michael Kay Software AG home: Michael.H.Kay@n... work: Michael.Kay@s...
|
