"Everything is XML, XML is Everywhere (we just couldn't knowit)"Steven Pemberton-CWI
17:00 - 18:00
When you store a photo, you can store it as a JPEG, or a PNG or in a number of other formats; when you store music you might store it as MP3, FLAC, WAV, or any number of others; when you store a film, you might store it as MPEG, XVID, or again any number of alternatives. But in the end what we really are interested in is the photo, the music and film. There are reasons to choose one format over another, but those reasons are in the service of our needs with regards to the content. Looked at in this way, XML is only there in the service of our data. There are reasons to choose XML as format, such as the interoperability, the toolchain, and the generality; but there are also reasons that people choose other formats, such as JSON, or (non-XML) HTML. From this point of view XML is just a particular serialisation of our data. This talk is about a general method that allows you to regard all formats, and all data just as different serialisations of data, and how you can get the XML serialisation out of every format, so that we can use it in our XML toolchains.
