Re: XML was RE: RE: A portable preferences library
J C Lawrence <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.games.devel.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 18:54:16 -0000 Alen Ladavac <[email protected]> wrote: > On a side note, this comment that "it is a HUGE ammount of work", is > based on a wrong assumption. Their problem is that the design was > wrong. If they went for generic binary format from the start, the work > would be near zero. But I digress. No, you missed the boat. XML is an encoding format. It says nothing about the data structures or data representation beyond the encoding. More simply, through use of URI anchors and references there is little (nothing?) that can be represented in a serialised binary format that can't also be represented in XML. The discussion to date has on representing things like raw vertex data in a highly abstracted XML form. That has obvious and unpleasant post-processing expenses. If you don't want those costs, don't incur them: encode your already post-processed system-optimised yada yada data structures into XML. There's nothing inherent to XML or binary data to prevent that. You don't need to design or write your encoding format. XML is JUST an encoding format. Well, it also happens to be a standardised encoding format, but that's more of a toolchain and code support issue. At the end of the day where disk heads don't meet platters the effective differentials are in the storage and parsing overheads, not in the data structures. The data that is represented is arbitrary, and for systems which don't need random reads (XML indexes badly) the performance differentials are invariably trivial. This written by someone who doesn't /like/ XML... -- J C Lawrence ---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. [email protected] He lived as a devil, eh? http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials. Become an expert in LINUX or just sharpen your skills. Sign up for IBM's Free Linux Tutorials. Learn everything from the bash shell to sys admin. Click now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1278&alloc_id=3371&op=click _______________________________________________ Gamedevlists-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gamedevlists-general Archives: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=557