Am 04.08.2011 12:18, schrieb James Weinheimer:
... it's all just computer codes and to the computer, it makes no difference whether something is coded "100a" or "personalNameMainEntry" ...
It is inelegant to use loquacious tags (and for other fields, to make sense, they got to be even much longer) like this, considering that each tag will have to be doubled in the closing tag. An abominable waste. Not so much of space - which costs nothing anymore - but of time you need to write these tags when you have to do anything with the stuff, and this also makes the writing much more error prone. And will catalogers use such element names as shorthand for their shop talk? How to pronounce the capital letters? And it is simply inelegant to have more wrapping than content. Mind you that the BNB XML files contain only a subset of the original MARC records but *much* more voluminous. Briefly: In the long run, inelegance cannot and should not win.
One of the real practical advantages to users, (at least I think) of XML comes with being able to create web services that can do all kinds of things.
That's not a built-in bonus of XML. Anyone who programs in Perl, PHP or Python (and others) can produce Web services not using XML. The service may *deliver* stuff wrapped in XML nonetheless, but it does not require the stuff to be wrapped like that in storage. So, for communication purposes you may still provide and enjoy all the comfort that XML may offer in particular environments and processes. Plus it may be changed whenever needed with no internal changes in your database. The latter is extremely important and much underestimated. In brief: Internal XML is technically not a requirement for anything. But ok, this is getting us nowhere, we are only repeting old arguments. I'm ready to convert to XML and buy it lock, stock and barrel as soon as you come up with a practical system, a usable schema, data wrapped up in XML, starting from the BNB data and doing a better job than mine (which uses no XML at all, internally, but can churn it out whenever you feel the need). And do that in less than 3 days. Or 4, ok. But complete with editing functions and real-time index update, which my demo doesn't demonstrate but is all there. Of no particular relevance, just for the record: The BNB XML-Data come in 7.6 GB of raw XML. My database, complete with indexes and everything, plus scripts for the web interface, gobbles up almost 2 GB. B.Eversberg
