Australian Stats Agency Goes Open Source

jimboh2k writes "The Australian Bureau of Statistics will use the 2011 Census of Population and Housing as a dry run for XML-based open source standards DDI and SDMX in a bid to make for easier machine-to-machine data, allowing users to better search for and access census datasets. The census will become the first time the open standards are used by an Australian Federal Government agency."

XML? that's so 1990

[goombah99]

I'm perplexed why people continue to use XML when there is YAML. What is it that makes XML so attractive as a durable format? it's not human readable in a practicale sense, and YAML very much is. Since it's delimeters are comlicated and variable, It's harder to parse in ad hoc ways than yaml (line and white space) which means that for rapidly extracting things there are no shorcuts to instantiating a whole document. It's hard to grep. And both formats can fully do the other ones job so they are interchangeable.

Re:XML? that's so 1990

[goombah99]

Great for human readability. Terrible (due to some python-like indent rules) for humans to add content to.

Oh come on man. This is like the ancient discarded whitespace lament about python. I was once like you before I started writing python. Then I saw the huge huge light of why white space indenting is so great. I could explain but I'm not sure I could have convinced even myself before trying it.

Bottom line. it's freakin easy to get the white space right and any decent editor with context sensitive tabs does it for you. emacs, vim, bbedit, eclipse. Is there any that don't?

This is a NON ISSUE

Meanwhile, XML might not be quite as nice as YAML for reading, but it is easier to figure out where you made a mistake, assuming you're pretty printing it (but the best thing is that pretty printing it is unnecessary).

Ha! you make me laugh. So now we need special editors and printers for XML reading. Were we not just complaining about white space. Now you pretty print to put perfect white space in XML?