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winkowski@m... wrote: > Do you regard office file formats as binary? To me they are application > specific file formats. Even so, is your comparison of these file formats with > XML a lossy comparison? That is does the XML version include all the > application specific information needed to recreate the application file or > is it limited strictly to the data content? I won't answer for Elliotte, but for me, yes, these are what I regard as informationally impoverished documents. That is, they are impoverished *as documents* because their creator relies either on specific schemas to be understood when a consumer instantiates these documents or relies on a consumer to use specific software to process them. In either case, the document itself it bereft of content which might otherwise be included to guide a document consumer to the semantics intended by the document creator. Whether the consumer is at all interested in the intent of the creator, or in re-creating specific semantics, is immaterial. Something has been left out of a document which the creator might have included if not for counting on a specific schema or specific processing software. That is, in fact, a binary format: an 'encoding' specific to one particular set of choices for its processing. It is also unquestionably lossy--even before we talk specifically about compression--because something has been left out of the *document* which is required to recreate the same data structure that the creator used.
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