On 24 March 2014 11:54, Joshua Kinard <[email protected]> wrote:
> That said, Is XML that specific that every single atom has to be wrapped by
> an individual tag? A comma-separated list of values in its own XML tag is
> prohibited by the spec? I don't use XML often (if at all), so I am not
> familiar with its intrinsics.
>
By nesting CSV inside XML, you've now got 2 formats to deal with instead of
1.
In pure XML, you can get a properly decoded array of tag elements with a
simple XPath query:
//tag
But with CSV-in-a-tag you have to extract the tag and subsequently parse it.
So you're hand implementing a parser to parse parts of XML that already
convey data without needing to hand-parse.
Which is more effort for everyone who touches the file, not less.
Add to that automated ways to update the tags ( again, having to implement
a custom serialiser in addition to the custom parser ) and its just not
worth the tiny amount of savings.
Because really, if space efficiency was #1 priority, we'd not be using XML
at all, let alone XML with pesky whitespace indentation that consumes
needless bytes. =)
--
Kent
