Greetings.
Arguably, this whole discussion is moot. If you're transporting enough data that XML efficiency becomes an issue, then you probably shouldn't be using XML -- that's not what it's for. A Swiss army knife is a wonderful thing, but shouldn't be used for brain surgery.
As Doug said:
On 2006 Oct 9 , at 16.09, Doug Tody wrote:
> (None of this may matter in the end as most people will probably use
> VOTable and FITS for spectra, but nonetheless array handling in XML
> is an important issue to consider).
While I take the second point, I would still maintain that using XML for this sort of transport is probably an abuse of tools.
There are ways of being efficient about XML, if that's what's really required. I have a paper sitting here by Peter Buneman and co at Edinburgh, on `Vectorizing and Querying Large {XML} Repositories', DOI 10.1109/ICDE.2005.150 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICDE.2005.150>. It describes a scheme (and points to others) for effectively compressing away the XML overhead, and transparently making it column- accessible, without actually losing the useful structuring. Bob Mann is one of the authors and could probably say more about it.
If bulk data and XML structuring are both seen as vital, then something like this is, I would think, a more stable solution to the problem than the parser-inside-parser solution of having strings of numbers within XML.
All the best,
Norman
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---- Norman Gray / http://nxg.me.uk eurovotech.org / University of Leicester, UKReceived on 2006-10-10Z14:46:24