[Followups restricted to comp.programming.]
In article <20051031100540.3a7c3281.steveo@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Steve O'Hara-Smith
<steveo@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>
> The essence of what I was thinking about was nested TLV
> structures which always seemed to me to be more robust than the
> paired delimiters of XML.
What would make TLV (by which I assume you mean type-length-value
vectors, presumably with binary, fixed-length encodings for type and
length) more robust than XML? It has less redundancy, and therefore
less capacity for error detection and correction.
A trivial example: say type is a single octet, and all 256 type codes
are defined. Then it is impossible to detect if a type value is
wrong (for whatever reason - program error, transmission error, etc),
without additional context.
XML makes many tradeoffs, and there are certainly applications where
a TLV encoding of some sort is preferable due to various plausible
constraints. But TLV is not "more robust" than XML in general.
That said, I agree that nested TLV structures looks like a better
choice for representing arbitrary structure data than the OP's
proposal of in-band signalling with special flag bytes. That means
restricting the domain of ordinary data values, which means some
kind of ****ft-encoding of values that are outside that doman, and
that's invariably a mess, error-prone, difficult to enhance while
maintaining backward compatibility, and inefficient.
--
Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
as a software professional, tradition requires me to spend
New
Years Eve drinking alone, playing video games and sobbing uncontrollably.
-- Peter Johnson
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