Appending to an XML document

[Larry Watanabe]

The decision to make an XML document contain just a single element is the
root of the problem. Perhaps the specification for future versions could
accept multiple elements in a single document. This would make concatenation
simple and has worked well in the lisp world which operates on similar
structures (s-expressions) both for representation of program and data.

-Larry Watanabe

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	uche.ogbuji at fourthought.com [SMTP:uche.ogbuji at fourthought.com]
> Sent:	Friday, December 10, 1999 9:39 AM
> To:	Ingo Macherius
> Cc:	Ross Bleakney; xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
> Subject:	Re: Appending to an XML document 
> 
> > currently I'm busy designing an XML based log format myself. In 
> > contrast to "classic line based logging", appending indeed is 
> > prohibitively costly in XML. Thus I decided not to log into a 
> > wellformed XML document, but to stick with a sequence of <Event> type 
> > doc-fragments, just being well-formed per event.
> > Of course one can not parse the result immediately, but at the time 
> > of log analysis (or whatever you do with your event data), it's 
> > trivial to pre- and append the necessary tags to enclose the doc-
> > fragments.
> > 
> > XML was just not designed to fit the demands of concatenatiation. But 
> > I found the value of structuring single events in a "semi-structured" 
> > (read: well-formed) way valuable enough to choose XML. The "missing 
> > enclosing tag" is not really a serious problem if you delay its 
> > insertation until REALLY necessary.
> 
> I don't really see this as a problem with XML.  Why must you consider your
> log 
> a well-formed XML document?  If you instead treat it as a well-formed XML 
> external parsed entity, then you are freed of the append problem, while
> being 
> fully XML compliant.  And, of course, you already hit upon this solution 
> yourself, by enclosing your log in a simple wrapper to create an XML
> document 
> for processing.  Despite the recent controversy about EPEs, most XML tools
> 
> should support them, and so you shouldn't even be too constrained in your
> XML 
> tool-set.
> 
> But again, I don't see a problem with XML here.
> 
> -- 
> Uche Ogbuji
> FourThought LLC, IT Consultants
> uche.ogbuji at fourthought.com	(970)481-0805
> Software engineering, project management, Intranets and Extranets
> http://FourThought.com		http://OpenTechnology.org
> 
> 
> 
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