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RE: The 11-pound solution to your XML problems

• To: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>,"Jonathan Robie" <jonathan.robie@d...>,"Tim Bray" <tbray@t...>,"XML Dev" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: The 11-pound solution to your XML problems
• From: "W. Hugh Chatfield I.S.P." <hchatfield@u...>
• Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 13:20:52 -0400
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <E17pWjk-00024S-00@c...>

I don't know...??

with silicon based machines... you can always go "general purpose" or
"specific purpose".  The specific purpose machine could merely offload some
very specific functionality from the the general purpose machine... and be
optimized (even at the IC level) to do just this one specific job.(e.g. like
a graphics processor can handle graphics)

If I read their literature right, the box can do XML to XML/HTML
transformations amoung other XML things (but couldn't do a Fourier Transform
say .. like a general purpose box might be able to do).

In my paper "Extending Application Layer Standards - Moving Beyond
Information Transport" in the proceedings of the Canadian Broadband Research
Conference 1998 .. Ottawa, Ontario.. I made the point that SGML/XML encoded
data opened the potential for the network to recognize what a message was
and act intelligently upon it. Certainly a message in XML destined for a non
XML compliant browser could trigger an XML to HTML conversion based on some
XSLT.  If it can be optimized to do it at 10X the speed of an equivalent
general purpose box.. then this seems "good" to me.

So I don't see this as merely an encoding issue... but the ability to act
upon the encoding in an intelligent fashion.. and within the network itself.
I don't particularly see why you see this as "wrong".  Maybe I am missing
something??

Cheers...Hugh

W. Hugh Chatfield  I.S.P.
CyberSpace Industries 2000 Inc.
XML Consulting & Training
http://www.urbanmarket.com/csi2000

-----Original Message-----
From: Alaric B. Snell [mailto:alaric@a...]
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2002 12:23 PM
To: Jonathan Robie; Tim Bray; XML Dev
Subject: Re:  The 11-pound solution to your XML problems


On Thursday 12 September 2002 16:55, Jonathan Robie wrote:
> At 07:05 AM 9/12/2002 -0700, Tim Bray wrote:
> >No, it's not a hammer: http://www.datapower.com/products/xa35.html
> >
> >Gotta love that nifty green paint job.  -Tim
>
> This may revolutionize XML the same way that the dedicated Britton-Lee and
> Teradata machines revolutionized relational databases.
>
> Yawn.
>
> Am I growing cynical in my old age?

I can't lose the feeling that something here is terribly, drastically, wrong
here. Nobody ever made an XDR (eXternal Data Representation, not the other
one) accelerator, an ASN.1 BER accelerator, or anything like that. Why
should
you need special hardware for the minor issue of how you encode your
information? I mean, if it's a complex encoding technique like data
compression or encryption then sure, but XML isn't like that. This is crazy!
Something's wrong!

>
> Jonathan
>

ABS

--
A city is like a large, complex, rabbit
 - ARP

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