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Re: Typing and paranoia

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Subject: Re: Typing and paranoia
• From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
• Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 17:31:27 +0100
• Cc: XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <oprgx6r8bgezizxn@localhost>
• Organization: Expway
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EEEACD11@h...> <oprgx6r8bgezizxn@localhost>
• Reply-to: robin.berjon@e...
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021126

Mike Champion wrote:
> I would totally agree that either 
> calling an alternative "XML" without qualification would be stupid, but 
> presumably this is a problem that HTTP content negotiation could handle
> easily if someone offered an alternative *standardized* "XML" serialization
> on their website.

And does. A specification I worked on recently uses SOAP, and mandates the HTTP 
binding with content-negotiation (I wish the official SOAP HTTP binding would do 
that as well...). They wished to transmit binary infosets optionally, and 
mandated XML for interoperability. This is not a closed system, on the contrary 
it's a very open one. Selecting between either option is a trivial matter of 
setting the correct Accept-Encoding/Content-Encoding, and it has shown to work 
very smoothly.

> I see several scenarios for the future: One is that the alternatives become
> moot -- Office 11 makes XML GUI authoring ubiquitous, and Moore's Law makes
> the bandwidth and performance issues associated with the XML 1.x syntax
> trivial.

That could very well happen eventually, but unfortunately, barring a revolution 
it won't be the case before at least a few years.

> Two is to legitimize the infoset- centric view of "XML" and have a
> manageable number of alternative syntaxes (with MIME registrations, etc. etc.
> to keep the Web sane).    Three is that people take option 2 without the
> blessing of the W3C, simply because they can't afford the overhead of the
> unicode tags, etc. in their constrained or high-performance environments, and
> we have real chaos.

2003 is to see several consortia start ratifying binary infosets, some of them 
might end up being home-grown. This wasn't obvious to me before I started 
delving into the topic, but I'm seriously concerned that chaos isn't very far away.

> People here seem to believe that Gates and Moore will save our butts :-)
> That's not the impression I get on web services-oriented and
> middleware-oriented developers, but I don't have enough first hand knowledge
> to judge.

It's not the impression I get from mobile, broadcast, and embedded orientated 
developers either.

-- 
Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
Research Engineer, Expway
7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE  8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488

• References:
  • RE: Typing and paranoia
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
  • Re: Typing and paranoia
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

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