I’m looking for people to give me some ammunition to win an argument with myself. I have a database table that stores denormalized data for presentation in reports. One of the columns will hold some messages that are taken from three different tables.

The three tables are parents, children, and child_messages, which contains custom messages associated with the keys stored in children. To include the children in a report that lists a number of parents, you have to do all sorts of stupid tricks. Denormalization is easier, especially because on this report there are a number of similar scenarios that all involve different tables, making things even more complex than I’ve already described. (I’m planning a blog post to describe this denormalization approach for later.)

The question is how to store the denormalized data. On the Web page, it’s presented in an unordered list. The data can also be downloaded in CSV format.

Some options include:

• Storing the messages in an unordered list. The nice thing here is that in the default case you don’t have to do anything to transform the data once it’s fetched. Just print it. If you do have to parse it, HTML is not the most difficult thing to parse.
• Storing the messages in YAML. It’s lightweight and there are already plenty of libraries to parse it. The downside is that the reports would always have to parse and transform it. Also, we’re not talking about an arbitrary data structure but rather a list of messages. So the flexibility of YAML doesn’t provide any value.
• Storing the messages in line-feed delimited format. Lighter and simpler than including HTML in the field, but again, must be transformed in all cases.

I also considered some other HTML options, but ultimately decided against all of them because there’s no point in using HTML if it’s not going to be the HTML that’s actually displayed on the page.

Opinions?