Re: The stupidest design I ever saw

topmind wrote:
> Marshall Spight wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
>
> Really? Where is the proof that that?

It was a joke. Read it again in ironic mode.

> Comma-seperated value format is far easier to build a parser for than
> XML.
>
> XML is for people who don't "get" relational IMO.

My take is that the Children of SGML have had such great success with document processing and especially with the web, that it's gone to their head. They have overgeneralized their techniques until they feel they have the right answer for structured data management. In fact, using XML to manage structured data makes about as much sense as doing document management in SQL.

Marshall Received on Sun Apr 09 2006 - 20:55:18 CEST