Re: Proprietary format "lock in"

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4584

Posted by sub
2005-11-12 04:24:47

> What if thirty years hence, no one knows or cares about XML?

I am quite certain that this will indeed be the case to a significant degree, given that going 30 years back, the PC was unheard of and the rate of change is continually increasing.

Nevertheless, XML is the equivalent of ASCII code; one can simply open it in an appropriate editor and actually read it and make sense of it. In fact, Microsoft initially provided freeware XML Notepad as an equivalent of Notepad.

> Is XML a sufficiently rich language to allow translation of _all_ the information in any database?

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language; as such, it is indeed sufficiently “rich” given that it can be extended as much as anyone would like.

> I think UltraRecall’s developers have voiced that XML doesn’t fully capture the hierarchies.

I am not sure what they mean, but I can think of a few cases that fit the description, i.e. XML is strictly hierarchical, as such it has no provisions for clones; it is far from ideal for binary data such as images, etc. Nevertheless, these can be catered for.

> In trying to export from UR into XML, I’m surprised at how little emerges.

That has to do with what UltraRecall’s developers have provided for; Hyperclip maintained data very similar to UR, including images, rich text, some metadata etc, using XML as its native format.

alx

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