"Simon St.Laurent" wrote:
> The XML-based file formats I've
> looked at lately - the format for Tinderbox, for instance - seem pretty
> plainly to be raw object serializations without much (any?) thought
> given to the markup.
Is that such a bad thing? If the XML really is just an object
serialization, why not just put it out there as such? What sort of
markup would you consider adding that differed from the canonical object
serialization?
Put another way, for a lot of information modeling, it seems that you
should be modeling in a format such as UML which can then be translated
to a number of formats, one of them (of course) being XML.
The main exception to this is when you are storing data in an XML
database. That is, when your data model is the XML data model. In this
case, it seems entirely appropriate to start with XML.
Or am I missing something here altogether?
> The relational database people, whatever their other sins, did an
> excellent job expressing things like normalization approaches.
> Object-oriented programming has school after school battling out these
> issues and best to accomplish particular information representations and
> processing. XML seems to have left all this to the wind.
Ah -- you mean sort of a DTD/schemas best practices, where you
concentrate on the XML itself, rather than optimal use of a particular
XML schema syntax. Correct?
-- Ron
