- XML is self-describing, binary is not.

Not to quibble, but that's only in a theoretical sense here. Something
like Amazon XML is truly self-describing. MARCXML is self-obfuscating.
At least MARC records kinda imitate catalog cards.
:)

Tim

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Andrew Hankinson
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm not a big user of MARCXML, but I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head:
>
> - Existing libraries for reading, manipulating and searching XML-based documents are very mature.
> - Documents can be validated for their "well-formedness" using these existing tools and a pre-defined schema (a validator for MARC would need to be custom-coded)
> - MARCXML can easily be incorporated into XML-based meta-metadata schemas, like METS.
> - It can be parsed and manipulated in a web service context without sending a binary blob over the wire.
> - XML is self-describing, binary is not.
>
> There's nothing stopping you from reading the MARCXML into a binary blob and working on it from there. But when sharing documents from different institutions around the globe, using a wide variety of tools and techniques, XML seems to be the lowest common denominator.
>
> -Andrew
>
> On 2010-10-25, at 2:38 PM, Nate Vack 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
>



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