Re: The stupidest design I ever saw

From: Volker Hetzer <volker.hetzer_at_ieee.org>
Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2006 10:48:12 +0200
Message-ID: <DuCdnaf6hvtSSKnZRVnyiA@giganews.com>

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.
>
> Another advantage of text formats is that anyone can write a parser
> for them.

Up to here I actually took this seriusly.

> You want as many parsers as possible; that way the
> market can decide on what variations of the format are acceptable.
Troll! You almost got me! :-)

Volker Received on Thu Apr 06 2006 - 03:48:12 CDT