On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Wout Mertens <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hi Daniel, > > Interesting, what hierarchy can you express in Sedna (XML) that you > can't express in CouchDB (JSON)? Let me start by saying I think json has already won the utility vs. usability tradeoff war. That said, there is nothing you can express in json that you can't express with xml+xsd (unweildy as this may be). But there are things baked into xml that aren't easy (or even possible) with json -- namespaces come to mind. Things like XPath and XQuery can be bridged (or bested) with a few client libraries (e.g. JSONPath and JSONQuery). But json will always live in a flat namespace -- and that's part of the charm. And let's not forget that (perhaps due largely to momentum) there's a metric shitton of good structured data locked up in xml, xhtml, even tidyable html. So to answer your question...*the web*. That's tough to express purely in json -- but luckily couch is flexible enough to allow external indexing and querying against all this tagsoup crap using something like sedna, monetdb, etc. And will no doubt be even more so in the future. I know you were kidding...just wanted to get across the * we-can't-discount-xml-and-the-others* point.
