How to serialize a graph structure?

Question

Flat files and relational databases give us a mechanism to serialize structured data. XML is superb for serializing un-structured tree-like data.

But many problems are b

Answer 1

XML is very verbose. Whenever I do it, I roll my own. Here's an example of a 3 node directed acyclic graph. It's pretty compact and does everything I need it to do:

0: foo
1: bar
2: bat
----
0 1
0 2
1 2