dolfin team mailing list archive

[Bartosz Sawicki <sawickib@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 13/01/09 09:37 PM, Jed Brown wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 13:54, Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > It would be nice to have it in XML to make it at least partly human
> > readable. One may look at the file and see that it's a mesh, function,
> > vector, whatever and that there is a portion of binary data.
>
> Are you familiar with XDMF?  It stores either as inline XML or as
> binary in a separate HDF5 file and is supported by ParaView and VisIt.
>  If you ever read from a parallel file system (using MPIO), the HDF5
> format is likely to be convenient and will perform lazy byte-swapping.
>  While XDMF is insufficient for my application, I think it's
> reasonably well designed and storing binary data in HDF5 is better
> than the alternatives.

For me, XDMF is worth to consider. But it should be treat as a new 
format in Dolfin, rather that an extention of already used XML.

Moreover, everything confirms that mixing binary data with XML is not a 
good idea. I'm afraid we can't avoid two files, if we want to include 
some human readable information. The other option is to have one binary 
file, and some utility displaying its internal structure (like h5dump).

regrd.
BArtek