 |
 |
- 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 > -- Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding