From: Matthias Troyer (troyer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-24 07:43:10
On Friday, November 22, 2002, at 03:33 PM, Wesley W. Terpstra wrote:
>>> * Some approaches, including XML, allow a practically unlimited
>>> number of
>>> different ways to represent the same data. The user rather than the
>>> serialization library should choose the particular design.
>
> XSLT will allow this. As long as the serialization library can output
> to
> SOME form of useful XML (such as the hierarchical format I propose),
> the
> mapping between any particular schema and this format can be done as a
> relatively straight-forward stylesheet.
I do not think that this approach is practicable. In our examples we
write gigabyte-sized files regularly. We do not want to store them as
even bigger files following a "standard" serialization XML schema, in
order to then try apply an XSLT engine that can handle such huge files
just to reduce it to the format we want. Any XML serialization library
(which this library does not necessarily have to be) should allow for
abitrary user-defined schemas. Just supporting SOME useful form is not
sufficient for performance reasons.
Matthias