5 ms·
> When XML came in, you had a good chance of getting UTF-8 or else one of the other UTF variants. Finally. Far more importantly: you get a declaration of the e
by brazzy 6y ago
> When XML came in, you had a good chance of getting UTF-8 or else one of the other UTF variants. Finally.
Far more importantly: you get a declaration of the encoding right at the start, so you don't have to guess.
> The fact that he takes an 38GB file and condenses it to 92MB speaks of it verbosity.
Those 92MB are not the entire payload data, he also filtered for the data of only one county.
- hyperman1 6y ago> Far more importantly: you get a declaration of the encoding right at the start, so you don't have to guess. True, but it was a lot worse than that. XML forced even the worst programmers to at least think half a second about the existence of the whole encoding concept. Some horrors from the past: receiving so-called text files generated by concatenating multiple exports. Every chunk had a different encoding, and there is no hint when the encoding changes mid-file or what was what. As most of it is ASCII, it seems to work and people don't even understand what the problem is. Another one: XML-support by pasting a CSV file between the beginning and end tag. <data>...CSV goes here...</data> . Of course, the CSV between the tags is not XML,violates escaping rules, and has no defined encoding. One of the worst I ever received went like <textfile><byte value='65'><byte value='66'>.... </textfile>. Now have fun converting every element to an individual byte, then finding out the encoding of the resulting text file.