(2005-02-15) Mcgrath Data Serialization Formats

Sean McGrath on XML vs alternatives for data serialization, as examined by an Alien Intelligence. Surely the programming models, the APIs, you would wish to use for hierarchies, tables and graphs are so different that a single data model gets you an uncomfortable lowest common denominator model? It sounds unpleasant... "They have not invented XML", he said, "because they do not need it.. Instead, they have developed technologies that we would probably call CSV++, XHTML++ and N3 (Notation3)++. Looks very sensible to me. I'm going back to their place. Bye."