Hi all, I've just spent the last couple of weeks delving into and decoding a binary file format. This, in turn, got me thinking about MARCXML.
In a nutshell, it looks like it's supposed to contain the exact same data as a normal MARC record, except in XML form. As in, it should be round-trippable. What's the advantage to this? I can see using a human-readable format for poorly-documented file formats -- they're relatively easy to read and understand. But MARC is well, well-documented, with more than one free implementation in cursory searching. And once you know a binary file's format, it's no harder to parse than XML, and the data's smaller and processing faster. So... why the XML? Curious, -Nate