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The interesting thing for me is that I've circled back to "CSV is good, actually" since for loosely structured source input, it has few equals - it lets you org
by syntheweave 4y ago
The interesting thing for me is that I've circled back to "CSV is good, actually" since for loosely structured source input, it has few equals - it lets you organize by cell, and you can use spreadsheet software to edit it. The balance shifts towards schema generation once you want to apply a specific model on the data, but "import CSV to my schema" is convenient as an interface to that.
XML also has a place as an interface, but it's much more niche, since most interfaces that are hierarchical-document-shaped are going to parse text instead of bracketed entities. I think we got a bit excited about how well HTML worked at the time.
- apelapan 4y agoCSV is nice for tabular data. Especially if it is plain and straight forward in its nature. This covers a lot of use cases. For an object graph, CSV is less nice.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoany graph can be represented as the set of tuples representing the edges. and in fact this is the most flexible form. it depends on if you need it "human readable" or not, but a hierarchical/network representation of a graph is only one representation
- apelapan 4y agoYeah, it is perfectly possible, I just don't think it is very nice. Neither for parsing nor for human reading. If I need a file or network message to represent a handful of object types with a bunch of relations that form a graph, I prefer XML (or JSON).