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Re: Typing and paranoia

• To: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Subject: Re: Typing and paranoia
• From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
• Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2002 00:21:00 +0100
• Cc: Mike Champion <mc@x...>, XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <3DF11A3D.9030907@t...>
• Organization: Expway
• References: <r01050400-1022-B5A405EC093611D7B6E70003937A08C2@[192.168.124.21]> <oprgzs66rvezizxn@localhost> <3DF11A3D.9030907@t...>
• Reply-to: robin.berjon@e...
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021126

Tim Bray wrote:
> Hmm, I gather that people out there are already cooking up binary 
> interchange formats that meet their needs.  Robin claims that there's a 
> strong existing candidate for a standard in this area in BiM.

Yes, but let me qualify this. I find BiM to be a very architecturally sound 
foundation for such a format, but it can be improved upon, it's a v1. The set of 
requirements it was created to answer was rather severe and included (amongst 
other things that may be of less interest to this forum) resilience to change 
and extensibility.

I honestly think that it is not too much work to take the current BiM 
specification and turn it into something that can satisfy the needs of a great 
variety of domains, in fact the current state in which it is is much more 
advanced than the MPEG-7 standard will reveal.

> This is 
> all well and good, and for any imaginable such format it's probably 
> going to be pretty easy to work out a canonical mapping to XML for 
> people who need it.

It's so easy as to be almost obvious. The BiM binary infoset is read with SAX or 
with the DOM, restituting the original XML vocabulary pretty much easily.

> If there is enough basis of experience for a standard in this area, 
> somebody has to invest the work to write it down and move it through the 
> process.  What we can't afford is to let someone stick a label on the 
> side of such a project that says "XML".  XML is, and should remain, a 
> very specific promise about making available bits on the wire in a 
> single highly-constrained textual syntax. -Tim

Agreed, agreed, and agreed.

-- 
Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
Research Engineer, Expway
7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE  8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488

• References:
  • Re: Typing and paranoia
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • Re: Typing and paranoia
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
  • Re: Typing and paranoia
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

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