> XML is for exchanging data. The goal of XML is to identify > the relevant items of a set of data and give them a semantics. > We can't consider the same a table of n x m values and > a textual description. I'm afraid the "right" thing to do for > an XML format is to eventually go tagged (and, of course, > provide a viewer).
Perhaps a good compromise between the XML "granularity", readability, and performance would be to tag the data per row as below: <Example> <dataTable> 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 </dataTable> <dataTableXML> <tr> <td>00</td> <td>01</td> <td>02</td> <td>03</td> </tr> <tr> <td>04</td> <td>05</td> <td>06</td> <td>07</td> </tr> </dataTableXML> <dataTableCompromise rowdelim=" "> <row>00 01 02 03</row> <row>04 05 06 07</row> </dataTableCompromise> </Example>