On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Elizabeth Mattijsen wrote:
> At 12:53 -0400 10/21/03, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> > > Yeah, if you're just needing to tag the stream with a label to indicate
> >> the type plus a version number, then xml's on the one hand overkill and
> > > on the other hand not necessarily a big help to xml proponents.
> >So, in a nutshell, throwing an XML format type tag at the beginning buys
> >us nothing regardless of whether it's an XML stream or not?
>
> Yep. But mainly I think because you'll need to encode binary data to
> make it valid XML. That's on overhead you don't to suffer for those
> serialization that don't need it.
I had it in mind that the XML parsers were all event driven so they'd read
the header and stop until prodded, and wouldn't be prodded on if it wasn't
a real parrot XML serialization stream, so binary data wouldn't matter.
> If you ask me, you could do easy with a simple header line like:
>
> parrot xml 1.0
> \0
>
> basically magic word ('parrot')
> followed by a space
> followed by the type
> followed by a space
> followed by version
> followed by a CRLF (not sure about this one, but could be nice)
> followed by a null byte
That works for me, including the crlf. Congrats, you just defined the
parrot serialization header tag! :-)
> I'm not clear if you would know beforehand how many bytes of data you
> would receive. If that is possible to know at all time, then I would
> suggest having the length as an extra part of the header.
Since we're going to potentially be serializing to an on-the-fly
unseekable device (i.e. dumping to a socket) so no length.
> >In that case, nuts to that. It's already terribly obvious I'm going to
> >mess it up if I try, so we'll just skip it and move on to the next
> >headache. :)
>
> Which means I'll be going back to lurking mode again... ;-)
Waiting to pounce, huh? :)
Dan
