[ODE] XML ODE Data Interchange Format (revision 5)

[Nate W]

On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, William Denniss wrote:

> But, just how large is the XPath addressability advantage?  Wouldn't it
> almost be easier just to tokenize an array of floats into an array than
> using many XPath calls?

That's a valid point.  The nice thing about the XPath idea is that if you
have an XSL library, you can do XSL transforms with just a couple of lines
of 'real code' and put the format conversion stuff into an XSL file (which
is still code, in a sense).

Also, if you have code that reads XML and reflects the data into objects
in memory, you can read XML almost for free - just define objects that
match the XML schema, or define a schema that matches the objects and use
XSL to get the XML into the requried schema.

> Not only is the code simple, and the data size small, but the parsing
> speed is also very fast. [...] If there is an optimisation that we can
> do which doesn't come with an expensive trade off we may as well take
> it.

Fair enough.  I still vote for XML, but I'll not complain if I get
outvoted. :-)

-- 

Nate Waddoups
Redmond WA USA
http://www.natew.com/