Roy Smith, 28.12.2010 00:21:
To go back to my earlier example of<Parental-Advisory>FALSE</Parental-Advisory> using 432 bits to store 1 bit of information, stuff like that doesn't happen in marked-up text documents. Most of the file is CDATA (do they still use that term in XML, or was that an SGML-ism only?). The markup is a relatively small fraction of the data. I'm happy to pay a factor of 2 or 3 to get structured text that can be machine processed in useful ways. I'm not willing to pay a factor of 432 to get tabular data when there's plenty of other much more reasonable ways to encode it.
If the above only appears once in a large document, I don't care how much space it takes. If it appears all over the place, it will compress down to a couple of bits, so I don't care about the space, either.
It's readability that counts here. Try to reverse engineer a binary format that stores the above information in 1 bit.
Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
