VOTable alternative? Parsing VOTables

[Mark Taylor]

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Martin Hill wrote:

> Finally our replacement VOXmls should be able to handle a certain amount of 
> data, but we should not not not be thinking of using XML as a standard for 
> passing around arbitrary sizes of data results.  The waste in processing power 
> for de/compression and parsing, disk space and/or network bandwidth would be 
> dreadful!  XML is a rich language for description and messaging.  Lets use it 
> for that.

I quite agree, and ... isn't that just what we have with VOTable already?
VOTable describes the metadata associated with some tabular data,
and describes how to access this data.  The tabular data itself may
be stored inline as TD elements (if it's not too big) otherwise it is
best put at the end of a URI somewhere.  Perhaps the problems that
people are coming up with in this thread are a result of trying to
force VOTable to be the answer to all our questions rather than
just using it for what it was intended for.  From section 1.1 of
the VOTable document:

  "VOTable is designed as a flexible storage and exchange format for 
   tabular data, with particular emphasis on astronomical tables"

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor    Starlink Programmer     Physics,  Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/