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Comment by lifthrasiir | Hacker News Reader

> I disagree, although I do not believe that this disagreement should have to affect some file formats, [...]

Ah, if you just want to make the UTF-8 requirement less strict for simpler decoders, that can be actually okay. My belief is more about legacy encodings like Shift_JIS.

I never seriously tried to fit any graph struture into a serialization format, so I don't yet have a very concrete opinion besides from what was already said. (I'm not even sure Concise had a good approach for that...)

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That is hard to believe, the data being serialized may always have a graph structure.

"May", not "should", so some data don't have a graph structure. It really boils down to the ratio between non-graph data and graph data. I have some reason to believe that the former far outnumbers the latter, but maybe you have some concrete evidences against?

You misunderstand. Given that data MAY be a graph structure, the markup MUST support that. A tree with pointers to the parent nodes has a graph structure, a common enough occurrence.

Data MAY also include Egyptian hieroglyphs not encoded in Unicode. Does it mean that the markup MUST support them as well? I bet not. No format can natively support every possible data structure; serialization formats only have to support enough of them to which remaining structures can be isomorphically mapped.

> a common enough occurrence

Do you have a concrete figure about "common enough"? Otherwise we are only talking through anecdotal evidences (not necessarily bad though!). At least in my experience, graph structures do occur from time to time but almost all of them can be easily rewritten to non-graph form because they are typically DAGs and obviously ranked (i.e. its preferred topological order forms partitions of different nodes). The general graph that requires something like references was very rare.

The point is one can apply the xᴇɴᴏɴ library to arbitrary data and generate representative markup. For “Egyptian hieroglyphs not encoded in Unicode” 𓀠 one can write plug-ins.

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