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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