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From: Al B. Snell <alaric@a...> >To date: Can I say I think it is quite bad form to state personal opinions as a "summary" of a discussion. In particular, the #4 >4) Regarding human-readability; if the format is ubiquitious like JPEG or >ZIP or gzip, then there will be tools to view them, just like there are >tools to examine zip files and so on. The human readability argument >really only tells us that non-public proprietary standards are bad; it, >again, is not really about text vs. binary. The fact that text viewers are >very widely available already is a plus point for textual encoding, but >it's probably of similar magnitude to the speed gain of binary encoding in >many applications :-) This is utterly cart before the horse. Things succeed if they fit into existing technical infrastructure: the WWW fits on top of the Internet, XML fits on top of text and on top of existing APIs for programming languages (e.g. printf() in C). A binary format may have a chance of succeeding if it fits on top of XML and it has some significant niche use better than encryption and ASN.1. There are *not* other tools. There is not another MIME branch like text/* which defaults to anything. Text can be edited as text: grepped, searched, sorted, which gives a different view of the data from tree-systems. It starts from where we are. "Tools" means tools in English at the start. So a binary format re-inforces the center-periphery status quo: it adds another hurdle for foreigners. Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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