James Stroud wrote:
On Nov 16, 2010, at 10:57 PM, Ethan Merritt wrote:
Bleah. Virtually none of those are human-readable, no matter what the
wikipedia page may choose to put as a heading title.
What kind of data are you dealing with? PDF would indeed be an odd
format for
diffraction images, but it would be miles better than most of the
formats on
the list you point to.
The operative word is "dataset", which is a subset of all things "data".
A dataset should be in a format that
1. can be validated
2. is structured
3. is machine readable
Hello,
They should allow YAML: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML
Then they will keep all the above and win an extra:
4. human readable
Which makes it way better than the ugly and verbose XML.
Regards,
F.
A pdf file *guarantees* none of the above. It is a presentation format
and is not optimized for validating, structuring, or ensuring the
machine readability of the data that it might contain.
I'm not advocating for any particular serialization format. So this
isn't about JSON v. XML religion wars. This is JSON or XML versus a file
format that is basically designed to ferry presentation information
between printers or computer screens.
James
