On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 06:16:16PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
Which is better on the above two points are debatable
I have experience reading and editing both and i have to admit i hope to never see xml again out of its real place ( spanned text description ).
xml need closing tags (which are often better for clarity, like comments next to /TMPL_IF tags)
I didn't meant end tags but extratags. In yaml, you can write authors: - John Doe - Octave R. Gebel - Agathe dablooz then you have an array. The equivalent XML would be something like <authors> <element>John Doe</element> <element>Octave R. Gebel</element> <element>Agathe dablooz</element> </authors> element tag is there only because of xml serialization so you need extra config in to make your xmlparser add dans remove tags correctly when reading/writing files. Too error-prone for me.
which I don't like because humans are poor at seeing whitespace.
a point for xml ... but - as in xml: that parser will help you - errors are easier to fix by hand. By experience, it's easier to find a hash key without tailing space than tring to understand how an accidentaly removed char in a tag breaks all the tree.
- it supports pointed structures Do we need them?
It depends if we can extract informations and links without having references to the database ids - it will be hard to do it in some cases. For exemples: authorities are storing DB ids inside the marc record. - it will be the good strategy if we want a tool that is not just another mysql dumper (updating versions, merging 2 bases, ...)
- it's now supported everywhere
Not everywhere, but probably comparable with XML. Does MySQL handle it now?
mysql comes with its own grammar (sql) so why must sql have to know something about xml or yaml ? regards -- Marc Chantreux BibLibre, expert en logiciels libres pour l'info-doc http://biblibre.com