RobertYoung (2/19/2012)

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I can no longer find a cite, but Fabian Pascal once made the obvious point: xml is not in any meaningful way "self describing", for if it were both the sender and receiver of data streams would need no explicit coding. Of course, that's bunk. The structure of the data must be known by both, and since that knowledge exists, then the smallest overhead in the data stream wins. By that strict criterion, cvs (or fixed column) wins. If data need be somewhat interpretable, then JSON is the least confusing. JSON also mediates silly hierarchies, which is a good thing.