Cart
|
[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: more silly questions
 Rick Marshall <rjm@z...> writes: > to me it's [rfc822] a bit like vinyl. that was the last sound storage system that > could be replayed mechanically. all you need is a needle and a paper > cone. try that with a cd. well ascii .txt is a bit like that. you don't > need any extra software to read it (cat or type being the equivalent of > a needle and cone). but just like the recording industry i think there > are big gains from using more sophisticated techniques to code our > information and standards, even at the loss of some basic portability. I think better of the music industry than that they'd adopt a technique for the sake of its sophistication. There were specific advantages to the new CD format that made content producers and consumers choose it over the existing standard: smaller physical size, lower marginal manufacturing cost, better quality, larger capacity, better durability, faster seek times (you don't have to manually move the needle to find the track you want), high cost of copying, at least before cheap CDR devices came along (this applies to cassettes more than LPs). I don't believe XML offers any such advantages over rfc822-style text headers. Specifically, rfc822 offers applications a lot of flexibility about how detailed their parsing of the headers is. If you are a mailing list program, you care about the content of Received: headers because you want to avoid mail loops, but most MUAs treat them as opaque strings. Procmail may look into the Subject: field to sort messages into an appropriate mailbox, even though http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt#3.6.5 says it is unstructured. If you wanted to provide the same flexibility in an XML syntax, you'd either have to specify each EBNF production form the rfc as an element, or require clients to do serious microparsing. The former is unhelpful because there is a surprising variety of applications that process mail and they have completely different needs; no size DTD will fit them all. The latter offers no advantages over the existing syntax. > my point is that if soap and the work on xml security really does work > then an xml based mail system using those technologies (or similar) Note that both the HTTP and the email bindings for SOAP rely on rfc822-style ASCII headers to work. You don't /have/ to use either, but these are the two that people use AFAICS. Ari. -- Elections only count as free and trials as fair if you can lose money betting on the outcome. 
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
|||||||||
