Alexander Johannesen schrieb:
>>> Hmm. What about XML as a standard is not elegant?
>
> On 8/27/07, Bernhard Eversberg <ev_at_biblio.tu-bs.de> wrote:
>> Indeed it isn't. A format that gobbles up more bytes for tagging than
>> the data it wraps cannot be elegant.
>
> Rubbish. What definition of "elegant" are you using? Let's just use
> WikiPedia : "Elegance is the attribute of being tastefully designed,
> decorated and maintaining refined grace and dignified propriety."
> These are all about taste, not about byte size.
>
Yes, but. Mathematicians, for example, have a different notion which
is not easily defined but it has not much to do with taste. They usually
agree about a proof being elegant - which wouldn't happen were it
a matter of taste alone.
> And thinking saving 200 bytes per record is a *win* is - to put it
> mildly - just plain ignorant.
>
Not just 200. A MARC record can easily have more than 50 subfields,
adding up to 1500. But OK, an XML record is still MUCH shorter than the
full text of the document - if only we had that for indexing.
I wasn't saying we have to save space but that bulk and loquaciousness
aren't elegant.
>
> I'm sorry, but I fail to see anything elegant in there. In fact, I see
> lots of limitation, such as the impossibility of recursing, using $
> for other things easily, humanly seeing stops and starts, and no
> possibility of more than two levels of strict structure. Elegance?
> Nope, sorry.
>
OK, I'm full well prepared to jump the XML bandwagon if only I saw the
full-scale, fully operative applications that demonstrate its vast
superiority over the legacy systems we have. Where are they? What, BTW,
has become of the XMLMARC project launched ambitiously at Stanford in
2002? Their website is "being reorganized" - since 2005-03-25.
"MARCXML Web Services" at LC is "coming soon" - since 2006-07-26.
Observations like this incite me to be provocative, sorry about that,
when I should be cheering them on...
B. Eversberg
Received on Mon Aug 27 2007 - 05:42:17 EDT