On 03/23/2014 19:18, Kent Fredric wrote: > On 24 March 2014 11:54, Joshua Kinard <ku...@gentoo.org> 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.
I am probably thinking from a Python perspective then. All you have to do is grab the value of <tags> and then split it on the comma. No custom parsing needed, since that function is built into Python. I guess this might not be the case with other languages, though, and it really just adds to my distaste of XML as a format for metadata.xml in the first place. > 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. =) I guess I need to start looking for used TARDISes then... Thanks for the explanation. -- Joshua Kinard Gentoo/MIPS ku...@gentoo.org 4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28 "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between." --Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic
