Re: The stupidest design I ever saw

Marshall Spight wrote:

> 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.

Actually, that isn't entirely true. Any data structure that has the concept of a 'node' can be implemented
with a database table, including linked-lists, binary-trees, etc. The only question really is whether it is
efficient (or necessary) to do so.

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