Dear Nate,

There is a trade-off: do you want very fast processing of data -> go for binary data. do you want to share your data globally easily in many (not per se library related) environments -> go for XML/RDF. 
Open your data and do both :-)

Pat

Sent from my iPhone

On 25 Oct 2010, at 20:39, "Nate Vack" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I've just spent the last couple of weeks delving into and decoding a
> binary file format. This, in turn, got me thinking about MARCXML.
> 
> In a nutshell, it looks like it's supposed to contain the exact same
> data as a normal MARC record, except in XML form. As in, it should be
> round-trippable.
> 
> What's the advantage to this? I can see using a human-readable format
> for poorly-documented file formats -- they're relatively easy to read
> and understand. But MARC is well, well-documented, with more than one
> free implementation in cursory searching. And once you know a binary
> file's format, it's no harder to parse than XML, and the data's
> smaller and processing faster.
> 
> So... why the XML?
> 
> Curious,
> -Nate