Christopher Sawtell wrote:
Try reading a page of XML and see what I mean.
It all depends on whether the author of the XML file, or more to the
point, the author of the generator which wrote the file, intended it
to be human readable or totally obfuscated.
For example this is my record in a GRAMPS genealogical database
expressed in XML:-
<person id="I1" handle="_ade6425167357999918" change="1196237841">
<gender>M</gender>
<name type="Birth Name">
<first>Christopher</first>
<last>Sawtell</last>
</name>
<eventref hlink="_ade6426c5ea7bc87637" role="Primary"/>
<eventref hlink="_ade6426d4b25e895e2d" role="Primary"/>
<address>
<datestr val="1943 to 1962"/>
<street>28 Howard Walk, London N2.</street>
</address>
<address>
<datestr val="1962 to 1966"/>
<street>Various in England.</street>
</address>
<childof hlink="_ade64254d715fdfae15"/>
<parentin hlink="_ade64256e727586d29f"/>
<parentin hlink="_ade642516705f1618b0"/>
</person>
And here is the record for my father:-
<person id="I4" handle="_ade64254d9b3ebb728d" change="1196024543">
<gender>M</gender>
<name type="Birth Name">
<first>Herbert Victor</first>
<last>Sawtell</last>
</name>
<eventref hlink="_ade6427693c06d7ec85" role="Primary"/>
<eventref hlink="_ade64278035290de983" role="Primary"/>
<objref hlink="_ade6474aa2142335cb6"/>
<childof hlink="_ade64259a4e59c683f4"/>
<parentin hlink="_ade64254d715fdfae15"/>
</person>
Notice how the <childof hlink="_ade64254d715fdfae15"/> in my record
corresponds to the <parentin hlink="_ade64254d715fdfae15"/> in my
father's record.
OK. This particular file is gzipped first, but after decompressing it,
it's all human readable as ASCII characters - granted only after a
fashon, but readable in any standard ASCII file display program, none
the less. i.e it's not encoded into some secret jumble. Essentially
that's what all the who-ha about OOXML is all about.
With respect, you are confusing "human readable" with "open".
That file is not readable by a human without very considerable effort.
It is designed to be read by a machine and converted to something else
to be read by you and me, or manipulated within the machine for another
purpose (like inserting in a database). In that case the "machine" being
a genealogical parser like GRAMPS. Another program with knowledge of the
DTD could also read it, or produce it from a database, or format it for
printing. Thats "open" not "human readable". Show your XML to Charles
Dickens or George Orwell or in fact the average man in the street and
they will not understand it. Apply a CSS stylesheet and make it look
like a printed page and you would make it human readable.
For someone who is clearly quite a stickler for the english language, it
is surprising that you consider XML to be human readable. Human
decipherable perhaps, open definitely (in the absence of binary blobs),
but human readable a firm no!
