Re: The stupidest design I ever saw
Date: 5 Apr 2006 11:17:49 -0700
Message-ID: <1144261069.307984.87700_at_j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>
Joseph Kesselman wrote:
> Mikito Harakiri wrote:
> > <node id=0 parent_id=null label='A'>
>
> Whatever that is, it isn't XML. XML attribute values must be quoted.
Exactly. Once you put quotes around the attribute values, the design becomes really good, because text based formats are flexible and nice. You can just put in whatever you want. That's the right way to manage structured data. "Traditional" databases are no good, because tables are flat, and the real world is tree structured. There are lots of structures that you can't express as a single table, like a linked list.
Another advantage of text formats is that anyone can write a parser for them. You want as many parsers as possible; that way the market can decide on what variations of the format are acceptable.
Marshall Received on Wed Apr 05 2006 - 20:17:49 CEST