On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 05:47 -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > Darren New wrote: > > Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > >> So, Google has decided to "share" their "replacement" for XML: > > > > It's not a replacement for XML. It's a replacement for ASN.1, or misused > > XML. > > Except that it doesn't look like they even *thought* about ASN.1.
You are demonstrating remarkable telepathic powers there. > They just thought about how they were abusing XML. I think, if you look at the work they did, it was clear they were influenced by some of the thinking that when into ASN.1, specifically ASN.1 PER. Even if the original people who worked on it were somehow shockingly ignorant of ASN.1, do you really think everyone hired subsequently would be? Take a look at the ASN.1 implementations out there. Most of the good ones are commercial, complex, etc. Those issues may not be a big deal for you, in which case ASN.1 makes perfect sense. This is not the case for Google. > > Well, that and that it's a markup language. But repeating the IDL in > > every record doesn't make a whole lot of sense. > > Yes and no. That's true if everything is just internal to your own > program. However, once you start dumping data into a generalized > persistent store (eg. BigTable), that's could be the difference between > terabytes of dead data and data that's useful because nobody can > remember what program stuffed all that data there. Really, if you don't know how the data got there, even having self describing data is of limited use (unless you descriptions are so large they approximate the size of your source code). There is no question there are great places to have self-describing data. It's a great hammer, but the rest of the world isn't necessarily a nail. --Chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
