Nicolas LEHUEN wrote:

>  The subtle thing here is that apart from the hierachical vs. flat structure
>  difference, very is no semantical "leap" from CSV to XML. Tag names are
>  basically the same things as column headers. Therefore, there is, I insist,
>  no more self-description of data in XML documents than in CSV files.

Not if the document is complete and correct, but if there is a mismatch between
the number of columns in the header and the number of columns in a row, you may
never know which column value is missing. Surely at worst, this is clarity at
the expence of potential redundancy?

>  You point the fact that lots of CSV files don't have column headers. Fine.
>  Then let's just create a CSV++ specification that enforce column headers. Et
>  voila ! We got a so-called "self-describing" CSV format.

Isn't a header analagous to a DTD? It describes how a document should be
constructed, not necessarily how it is constructed. Surely the
self-descriptiveness during error recovery is not out of scope?


--
Regards,

Marcus Carr                      email:  mrc@[...].au
___________________________________________________________________
Allette Systems (Australia)      www:    http://www.allette.com.au
___________________________________________________________________
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
       - Einstein



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