Re: [xml-dev] Serialization of XDM - Use cases / Proposal

All,

I have been reading this thread with much interest. I don't think I have
much to add in terms of the serialisation format (save I would personally
prefer an XML format without having academic argument for such a
preference).

As an extension/example of use-case 5 - Provide a human readable output of
XDM data - I thought that such a serialisation format could be to create
standard XPath/XSLT debugging dump that could be more tightly integrated to
the host language - e.g. using xsl:message, XPath trace(). Furthermore a
standard format could also give rise to portable unit testing frameworks
where assertions could be performed against the XDM serialised form or
provide a convenient way of saving mementos of processing state - as
previously alluded to this could be useful in languages such as BPEL or
XProc.

None of these things is impossible with existing tooling, I just think this
would change the ratio of work that would be done by the tools rather than
the application developer.

Michael Odling-Smee