Re:What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
by geezerjay on Thursday November 02, 2017 @02:30PM
(#15612973)
The same is not true for any binary file. A hexdump of a plain text file is not as readable as opening the same plain text file with any basic text editor such as any notepad clone. That's the whole point: no one needs to install any software, let alone a specialized client, to read any human-readable format.
More to the point, no one needs to install a full blown database engine to read a plain text document.
You may argue that specialized tools make the job easier, but you also need to acknowledge that requiring specialized tools just to open a text file is silly.
A printout of XML contains the data in a structured and understandable format.
A printout of a binary dump does not provide any clues as to how the data was structured.
Re:What If OpenDocument Used SQLite?
by Chris2048 on Thursday November 02, 2017 @11:53AM
(#15611483)
This is useful if you only need to read the data. If you need to process it in large amounts, its not so useful. And what if you need to traverse graph-like data in an XML format?
> a binary dump does not provide any clues as to how the data was structured
True, but if that binary format is SQlite, the structure is fully documented. You could work it out mentally just as you could work out any given XML schema.
XML is only trivially "readable without any software at all". The same is true of any binary format - the issue is that it can be read, but not easily processed - which is also the case for XML (you need to integrate an XML parser for that).
And if you are including XML libs, why not SQlite libs?