[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Another binary XML approach
As I recall, WAP servers convert to WML, preclude XML validation on the client, make very little use of WMLScript (so it is said) and do little form entry validation. So this is a client that needs all the help it can get and the binary already fielded, tested, and proven effective is serving that client. As to transform for device independence, for sure, but that is XSLT in a nutshell. Intermediaries seem to be proxies with another name. I don't know enough about what IBM has done from that article. Objects offering services to other objects doesn't sound like a "world changing" idea. Call me sceptical but glad to be proven wrong on that one. HumanML processors could work like that too. What I read in that article makes sense from the perspective of value-added processing. I only note that "middle man" exacts a cost for the service. Caveat emptor. GZIP is in use and so far so good. IE clients also zip now for the network. I've nothing on high transaction systems so someone with some experience there should comment. On the other hand, MS, Oracle do a lot of that and I don't see their representatives asking for this in this thread. In other words, if we argue from "common experience", the argument tends in the other direction. I'm not saying binaries won't be helpful; just that so far the amount of help has yet to justify the "standardization of a common XML binary". It has justified language specific binaries. Simple solutions are easy to find. The right solution may not be. It may be the case that given costs "no size fits all" so the right solution is status quo. As others have pointed out, the requirement for a binary needs some empirical evidence to back it up before one considers specing the system. Some infrastructure needs fielding experience before one even considers going to a "large organization" for authoritative justification. The IETF has a better approach for this. Spec/Develop/Field. Is is worthy? Adopt. <rant target="nonspecific"> Too often, waaaaay too often these days, people are justifying pet projects as open standards efforts when in effect, a small focused group should be creating a product, fielding it, and whomping on the competition "Standardize before productize" is the worst kind of colonization: "For queen and county and the natives have to accept our imperialism because we are the good guys." meanwhile, file patents, push out early and buggy implementations, make them eat the costs of our mistakes. It costs a lot to tear mistakes out of contracts.</rant> Nyet. Sean is right. Prove it first. Len Bullard Intergraph Public Safety clbullar@i... http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h -----Original Message----- From: Stefan Zier [mailto:Stefan.Zier@s...] Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 10:23 AM To: Bullard, Claude L (Len) Cc: xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: Another binary XML approach I wasn't saying that every XML applications should have a man in the middle, but as WAP shows, there are applications in which it does make a lot of sense. In my opinion it would make sense to agree on a standard binary encoding to avoid reinventing the wheel for each one of these applications. Unfortunately, most generic compression algorithms such as the dictionary-based one used by gzip are not suitable for embedded devices like mobile appliances and cell phones due to their fairly high resource consumption (memory and CPU cycles). Also, they're too costly to be applied to high-volume transactional applications. This is just a guess, but I think that a significant simplification and improvement in efficiency (both im compression ratio and resource consumption) could be achieved by an XML-specific compression scheme over generic schemes such as gzip. However, it needs careful design - remember, the simple yet suitable solutions are the most difficult ones to find. --------------------------------------- Stefan Zier Software Developer Syntion AG - http://www.syntion.com Leonrodplatz 2 - 80636 Munich/Germany Phone +49 89 52 30 45-0 Fax +49 89 52 30 45-20 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...> To: <xml-dev@l...> Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 4:04 PM Subject: RE: Another binary XML approach > It is an interesting read, but it seems that adding "middle men" back into > transactions has a way of defeating the thrusts of simplification and taking > > out cost. It is amazing how we keep replicating the complexity and costs of > human > communication using negotiating agents. > > Barrett: "Right. All you have to do is write up an XSL style sheet, install > it, and then set the configuration for when it should be used. Or you can > alter somebody else's style sheet practically knowing nothing, although it > is a fairly complex language. It's not for the faint of heart. I'd rather > program Java any day." > > "Simple" is a familiarity index. > > Len > http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard > > Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti. > Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Stefan Zier [mailto:Stefan.Zier@s...] > > http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/features/feat-transcoding.html > > They basically have a piece of software called "IBM WebSphere Transcoding > Publisher" which - amongst other things - has the capability of compressing > XML for certain communication paths. I think this is geared towards the app > server and mobile markets, but has some advantages, one important one being > that on both endpoints of communication data is still good old > human-readable XML. One cool thing about it is that it can also do lossy > compression (if you will) - it reduces a document to some subset that can be > understood by the recipient device (e.g. it might strip some images or tags > not known by mobile devices). > > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org, an initiative of OASIS > <http://www.oasis-open.org> > > The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > > To unsubscribe from this elist send a message with the single word > "unsubscribe" in the body to: xml-dev-request@l... >
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