Ultraseek Server CCE Uses XML

Date:    Thu, 28 Jan 1999 08:45:57 -0800
From:    Walter Underwood <wunder@infoseek.com>
To:      len bullard <cbullard@hiwaay.net>,
         XML Developers' List <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Why SAX needs namespace support

At 06:49 PM 1/27/99 -0600, len bullard wrote:
><aside>Has anyone created a list of the top characteristics of an
>application make it most amenable to using markup? We've tossed
>around parts of this on this list but I've not seen a thumbnail
>version one could give to a manager that "they will understand".</aside>

Since I've done this recently, here is why I did it. Ultraseek Server CCE uses XML in two different ways.

The private format is to store the topic definitions and transmit them to other servers in a distributed search network. I used XML there because I didn't feel like wasting my time spec'ing a new format, then writing and maintaining a parser for it. With XML, I just needed to spec a DTD. A straight productivity win.

The public use is to parse XML documents so they can be searched.

Actually, I have a third use here in the lab, but not released -- delivering query results in XML. The justification is similar to the first one, that is, I don't feel like writing another file format and spec and forcing our users to write and maintain special-purpose parsers. Right now, the query results have an inline DTD, and even though that costs 1.5 kbytes per result, the files are still smaller than a corresponding HTML result. Note, this is with everything as elements -- no silly "abbreviated format" like RDF.

wunder

Walter R. Underwood

wunder@infoseek.com
wunder@best.com (home)
http://software.infoseek.com/ (my product)
http://www.best.com/~wunder/
Tel: 1-408-543-6946

Prepared by Robin Cover for the The SGML/XML Web Page archive. For other information on Ultraseek and XML, see the the XML industry support page.

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