Re: XML Data format

[Tim Haughton <timhaughton@4space.org.uk>]

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George Danezis wrote:
| Dear All,
|
| I would also support an XML format definition for all administrative
| information. The problem is that I have no idea about writing DTDs and
| have never worked with standard XML parsers. I am a bit more cautious
| about the SOAP Business since it requires an online infrastructure that
| is complicated and big (a full HTTP server as I recall) that might make
| mixminion more fragile, when simple socket connections could do the
job. I
| am not a specialist again.
|

Chaps,

In mine, the humblest of opinions, wherever a file is written to the
disk, I should think: "could this be better done in XML?". Custom text
files are just that; custom.

Just to offer some guidance, any time spent learning the DTD lingo is
predominantly wasted. XSD's are the preferred way of validating XML
documents, and creating custom data types for your documents. Using XML
with XSD's therefore gives you a type safe object based interface to
work with. Which is nice.

SOAP is really good for serialising objects across net streams. Again,
it's a defined standard, and in environments like .NET, and I think also
Java, you get the functionality for free. Web services are a bloody good
concept, and one worth looking at for any web-aware apps.

- --
Regards,

Tim Haughton
http://4space.org.uk

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