[Esip-preserve] Provenance Issues

[Curt Tilmes]

On 10/18/2012 03:50 PM, Bruce Barkstrom wrote:
> I don't know that science teams can afford to put all of their data
> into XML - it does increase processing time by a factor of 1,000
> compared with just plain conversion from ASCII to double precision
> floating point [see my article in ESI on XML].

As you point out, XML isn't really that great for processing.  Where
it really shines is as an interchange language.  You can describe with
great specificity the schema for how pretty much anything ought to be
represented, and have a very high chance of you being able to read
something I wrote and I being about to read something you wrote.

That said, there is an effort underway for "Efficient XML Interchange"
that may address some of the performance and size problems of XML:
http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/

Curt