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On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Tim Spalding <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > - 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. Yeah -- this is kinda the source of my confusion. In the case of the files I'm reading, it's not that it's hard to find out where the nMeasurement field lives (it's six short ints starting at offset 64), but what the field means, and whether or not I care about it. Switching to an XML format doesn't help with that at all. WRT character encoding issues and validation: if MARC and MARCXML are round-trippable, a solution in one environment is equivalent to a solution in the other. And I think we've all seen plenty of unvalidated, badly-formed XML, and plenty with Character Encoding Problems™ ;-) Thanks for the input! -Nate