::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Simon Wistow]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 04:04:14PM +0000, Andy Wardley said:
> I believe the point that Simon is making is that the good thing about XML 
> here is not necessarily that it's a text format (which is a Good Thing)
> but that each and every part of the file contents is individually 
> addressable.

Sort of. What I was actually referring to was two things but I wasn't
very clear.

first:
If you're going to have rich, relational, meta data enhanced file system
with cusotmisable views then you're going to have to have a schema
describing it. Hopefully this should be transparent to the user but it's
absolutely necessary because otherwise when you transfer the directory
to another computer it won't know what the fuck to do with it. So you
say it's of type 'mail directory' and transfer the schema. Then you
transfer over the data representing the mails and also your directory
definitions and then the computer at the other end reassembles
everything. IF you already have the schema then it's not necessary to
transfer it (not that they'll be very big anyway).


second (and quite seperately):
schemas for binary files is a good thing because it allows easy file
format handling between platforms and languages. The other way to do
this is have platform independant, language independant APIs and then
write the accessor API once. This how .NET is doing it but I think
schemas are a better idea. But that's just me.

I wasn't arguing about the suitability of binary files over text files,
I was going to leave that to Alaric to do that since he's felicitously
just subbed :)

Simon