Quote Originally Posted by MK27 View Post
But serialization does not involve any form of conversion, ...
Serialization has two abstraction layers at least.

  1. Structure Definition
  2. Data Mapping

The first layer defines the object structure.

The second layer maps/converts memory representation of data into a specific format, for instance Binary format, XML format and URL format (they are supported in my library ).

Serialization is yet another data conversion I think and yes, it involves conversion.