On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Kevin Thiele wrote:

Over the past couple of days I've partially implemented an export function to produce Leigh's XDELTA documents (as a simple example of a possible XML format) for the data in Lucid keys. I have a key to families of flowering plants of Australia (240 taxa, 166 characters, 600 states). The data I'm using are simple - basically a score matrix, a list of taxa and a list of characters. The file sizes in three formats for these data are:

LucID 166 kb DELTA 240 kb XML c3 Mb

And this is only the most basic XML!.

By comparing three different encodings of a particular data set, I think that Kevin has given us a very graphic demonstration of the potential verbosity of an XML specification for descriptive data. This is definitely a syntactic issues that we'll need to address, even as we try to characterize the semantics of what it is that we need to encode.

For this reason, I would suggest that examples giving in XML should not imply that we'll end up actually using XML as the recommended syntactic encoding of descriptive data, and that indeed no decision has been made on this matter.

-Noel Cross