On Sun, 18 Mar 2001, Chris McDonough wrote:
"Potentially lossy" also doesn't mean "leaky". It just means that folks who expose their objects to this sort of serialization can choose their own format, and if it represents the object adequately for their own use in both directions, it's good enough.
If you want a lossless "morally binary" representation, it's probably best to use XML export, which is great for your purposes, because it already exists! ;-)
So you are saying that the reconstructed object must be functionally identical, but may or may not be bytewise identical when reconstructed from the serialization. For round trip editing, this seems reasonble. For CVS, not getting a lossless result could result in spurrious diffs. Somehow, though, I don't think this will be a problem in practice, and we can ensure that it won't be by requiring that a read of the reconstructed object produce a bytewise identical serialization to the one which was used to build the reconstructed object. This is likely to be the case in any reasonable serialization implementation, and so as I said should not be a problem in practice. --RDM