[sf-perl] Some well-formed XML?

[Rich Morin]

DF> Was this [1] supposed to refer to something that I missed?

I had planned to write a footnote, but forgot to do so.  So:

[1] XML is a very flexible serialization format, structured as a
     "list of lists", where each node can have an attribute hash.
     URIs can be used to encode "edges", allowing arbitrary graph
     structures to be represented.

     So, it's fairly straightforward to serialize a set of RDBMS
     tables as XML and load them back into another database.  The
     rules for the (de-)serialization, however, will probably be
     hard-coded into your dumping and loading code.

     Taking an arbitrary set of XML and loading it into an RDBMS,
     however, is a totally different proposition.  Consider that
     any web page can be transformed (e.g., via HTML Tidy) into
     XHTML, which is syntactically correct XML.  Care to load the
     result into a database?  Will the results be accessible (in
     a reasonable manner) by SQL?  Can you be sure that you picked
     up all of the "interesting" structural relationships?

-r
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