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Re: Is there anyone working on a binary version of XML?

• From: "Stephen D. Williams" <sdw@l...>
• To: "DuCharme, Robert" <DuCharmR@m...>
• Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 17:22:31 -0500

Let me clarify.  I want to create a new standard, very closely related to XML and tracking and
dependant on it, but using "binary" data structures.  What I really mean by "binary" is that
instead of a stream of characters that have structured meaning after parsing and
transformation to an internal datastructure, I want a data format that encodes an equivalent
data structure directly.  I have designed something that is directly usable in memory, as
loaded, with a DOM interface, or SAX, etc., only much more efficiently than starting from
XML.  The design I have in mind was controlled by an optimization process with constraints of
standard Java capabilities.

I think a reasonable name for this project would be: bXML or XMLb (probably the latter).

Thanks
sdw

"DuCharme, Robert" wrote:

> >I know, I know, this is anathema to what many of you feel is the
> >essence of XML, and I agree to a point.
>
> It's not so much about feelings, as about contradicting the XML spec.
>
> >From 1. Introduction (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-intro):
>
> "XML documents are made up of storage units called entities, which
> contain either parsed or unparsed data. Parsed data is made up of
> characters, some of which form character data, and some of which form
> markup."
>
> ("characters" there links to http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#dt-character:)
>
> A parsed entity contains text, a sequence of characters, which may
> represent markup or character data. A character is an atomic unit of
> text as specified by ISO/IEC 10646 [ISO/IEC 10646]. Legal characters are
> tab, carriage return, line feed, and the legal graphic characters of
> Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646."
>
> Applying XML concepts to a binary data format sounds interesting and
> potentially useful, but it wouldn't be XML.
>
> Bob DuCharme       www.snee.com/bob       <bob@
> snee.com>  see www.snee.com/bob/xmlann for "XML:
> The Annotated Specification" from Prentice Hall.
>
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