Talk:Comparison of data-serialization formats

This article was nominated for deletion on 6 August 2009. The result of the discussion was Move to Comparison of data serialization formats.

Reason for this article

Latest comment: 16 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

This content was a long list in the main XML article. I removed the list to put it here, because the XML article is already very long. Hervegirod (talk) 00:45, 6 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

Latest comment: 15 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

This section should be on the XML page...

XML provides a basic syntax that can be used to share information between different kinds of computers, different applications, and different organizations. XML data is stored in plain text format.^[1] This software- and hardware-independent way of storing data allows different incompatible systems to share data without needing to pass them through many layers of conversion. This also makes it easier to expand or upgrade to new operating systems, new applications, or new browsers, without losing any data.
It supports Unicode, allowing almost any information in any written human language to be communicated.
It can represent common computer science data structures: records, lists and trees.
Its self-documenting format describes structure and field names as well as specific values.
The strict syntax and parsing requirements make the necessary parsing algorithms extremely simple, efficient, and consistent.
Content-based XML markup enhances searchability, making it possible for agents and search engines to categorize data instead of wasting processing power on context-based full-text searches.
The hierarchical structure is suitable for most (but not all) types of documents.
It is platform-independent, thus relatively immune to changes in technology.
Its predecessor, SGML, has been in use since 1986, so there is extensive experience and software available.