What does serialization mean?

Hello,

On the iXML CG call this week, we had a short discussion about serialization[1]. Several different perspectives were expressed regarding what “serialization” means. 

I found that a little surprising because I would have asserted that it unambiguously meant “constructing a sequence of Unicode characters” that represent an XML document.

This is (literally) a serialization: <S>a</S>

If you parse ‘a’ with this grammar:

  S: 'a' .

and construct a representation of an S containing a literal “a”, I wouldn’t call the process of constructing that representation “serializaton”. 

On closer reading of the specification, it seems pretty clear that the word “serialization” is often (but not always!) a short hand for “making some XML.” I think that’s misleading. (I’m not saying you *can’t* call it that, technical specifications can define their terms any way they like, except, we don’t actually define “serialization” so we don’t do that either!)

I’ve taken a stab at teasing apart those two perspectives, it’s in PR 296 and the changes are highlighted here:

  https://invisiblexml.org/pr/296/autodiff.html

Alas, the navigation buttons seem to be broken. I’ll see about fixing that shortly. In the meantime, I think the changes are all highlighted.

Hopefully this is a good starting point.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] https://www.w3.org/2025/02/18-ixml-minutes#f6f8

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh
Saxonica

Received on Wednesday, 19 February 2025 13:49:45 UTC