3 ms·

That is hard to believe, the data being serialized may always have a graph structure.

• lifthrasiir 2y ago
  "May", not "should", so some data don't have a graph structure. It really boils down to the ratio between non-graph data and graph data. I have some reason to believe that the former far outnumbers the latter, but maybe you have some concrete evidences against?
  • GeneThomas 2y ago
    You misunderstand. Given that data MAY be a graph structure, the markup MUST support that. A tree with pointers to the parent nodes has a graph structure, a common enough occurrence.
    • lifthrasiir 2y ago
      Data MAY also include Egyptian hieroglyphs not encoded in Unicode. Does it mean that the markup MUST support them as well? I bet not. No format can natively support every possible data structure; serialization formats only have to support enough of them to which remaining structures can be isomorphically mapped. > a common enough occurrence Do you have a concrete figure about "common enough"? Otherwise we are only talking through anecdotal evidences (not necessarily bad though!). At least in my experience, graph structures do occur from time to time but almost all of them can be easily rewritten to non-graph form because they are typically DAGs and obviously ranked (i.e. its preferred topological order forms partitions of different nodes). The general graph that requires something like references was very rare.
      • GeneThomas 2y ago
        The point is one can apply the xᴇɴᴏɴ library to arbitrary data and generate representative markup. For “Egyptian hieroglyphs not encoded in Unicode” 𓀠 one can write plug-ins.