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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome fr
 Bob Foster wrote: > So if one called it BML and wrote SAX and DOM APIs to read and write it, > you'd be happy with it? That's still a little too close to comfort. For one thing, such a binary format is not markup and probably not a language. Come up with a completely different name, such as FIF (Flexible Information Format) that does not remind anyone of XML; and don't reference XML normatively or not in the core specs. Let it succeed or fail on its own merits. Then I'm happy. If someone wants to write DOM or SAX adapters for this new format, fine. Certainly people have written SAX adapters for all sorts of weird things such as SQL databases. There are problems when they do that. For instance a lot of apps that consume data from SAX implicitly assume things such as element names don't contain white space, and can get tripped up when SAX adapters don't enforce these conventions. But I can live with that. Still, I think it might be more productive for the FIF community to define their own APIs that better fit their data model than the XML data models. Yet another problem with inviting the binary community under the XML tent, is that they're not going to be satisfied with an alternate encoding for XML. This is only the tip of the iceberg. As soon as the binary folks get their spec approved, they're immediately going to want to change SAX and DOM and XSLT and everything else with just a few more extensions so they can pass around the binary data in its native form. After all, why pay the cost of converting to and from text all the time? (We already see this in XOP.) Then they're going to say that all the overhead of Unicode and BOMs and the like is just killing their performance, and can't we just cut out these pieces for the legacy parsers? Before we know it, plain vanilla XML is a distant but pleasant memory as we all struggle to deal with the mass of messy APIs to control the opaque binary data passing through our networks. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@m... XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim 
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