[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Request for Comments: XML binary encoding
1) The binary encoding itself, which replaces XML, should be a logical superset. I would suggest that entity declarations can appear at any point (like PIs) and either have scope from that point in the document order onwards, or lexical tree scope in document order within the current node and its children. The format will probably resemble a direct serialisation of a SAX event stream. There will be atoms (strings, numbers, symbols[0], etc) 2) The parser and serialiser will have SAX-like interfaces that do not directly emulate SAX due to the differing underlying representation, but are similar in spirit. There will be two filters between this and SAX - one for reading and one for writing - which embody an "XML adaption layer" on top of the binary encoding to encode the parts of XML that are not directly represented (DOCTYPE declarations, for example - apart from the entity delcarations therein)). I would imagine that the XAL would involve placing the XML document inside a top-level XML element (in the XAL namespace) containing attributes for the XML version number and the <!DOCTYPE ...>, if any. There would be no need for an encoding attribute - UTF-8 all the way, with all character entities expanded so there are no special characters in the strings; they can be processed literally. 3) There would also need to be a DOM replacelement. Existing DOM implementations can be used with the DOM tree built from an XAL SAX wrapper, but to use the advanced beyond-XML features for specialist applications (or, dare I dream, if this thing supercedes text-based XML ;-), a DOM that offers access to the nicer aspects (such as directly accessing numbers rather than the XAL having to convert them to strings which the application then converts back to numbers...) would need to be defined. 4) A catchy name is needed for the above three. netXML, netSAX, netDOM - emphasises the smaller size makes it more suitable for many of the networked applications of XML. XMLplus, SAXplus, DOMplus - also catchy, but isn't there already a DOMplus? I would ideally like to see a standard such as this reach the W3C, but if not, I can submit it as an RFC in some month's time. Until then, discuss... [0]Symbols are oft-used strings that are declared once and then referred to by a number - like my namespace IDs in an earlier proposal: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200104/msg00175.html Symbols are used for entity names, element names, attribute names, and so on. ABS -- Alaric B. Snell http://www.alaric-snell.com/ http://RFC.net/ http://www.warhead.org.uk/ Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software
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