On 06/07/2013 01:45 PM, Craig James wrote: > ... The CML project is one such (you might > want to look at it for ideas), but it never got traction.
XML is bad at tabular data. A table of x, y, x coordinates in properly
formatted xml is at least twice as many bytes ("<x>123.456</x>" uses as
many bytes for markup as for the value).
So projects like cml try to get around that by encoding values in
attributes -- about the #1 on how not to design your dtd list. The
problem is that only scales to a few dozen rows. Once you get to 10^6
molecules of 10^3 atoms, it doesn't scale either.
So it doesn't get widely adopted. Instead others do one worse and create
xml where tables are stuffed into #CDATA. Which means "a bunch of bytes
with whose meaning and structure was known to the postdoc who went back
to China three years ago".
Maybe JSON, with
> its widespread use and readily-available software, is just the thing.
JSON comes with less markup overhead, that's one of the reasons it's
seeing more use. The downside is exactly as you said -- too many (read
no) standards. The advantage of xml is the dtd: a valid xml document
tells you what the elements mean. All json tells you is array,
associative array, string, number, boolean.
--
Dimitri Maziuk
Programmer/sysadmin
BioMagResBank, UW-Madison -- http://www.bmrb.wisc.edu
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How ServiceNow helps IT people transform IT departments: 1. A cloud service to automate IT design, transition and operations 2. Dashboards that offer high-level views of enterprise services 3. A single system of record for all IT processes http://p.sf.net/sfu/servicenow-d2d-j
_______________________________________________ OpenBabel-discuss mailing list OpenBabel-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openbabel-discuss
