[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Typing and paranoia

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>, XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Typing and paranoia
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 14:44:55 -0500
• In-reply-to: <oprgx03bryezizxn@localhost>
• References: <3DEF8BFF.4030100@t...> <oprgx03bryezizxn@localhost>

At 12:48 PM -0500 12/5/02, Mike Champion wrote:


>You don't REALLY want two processes on the same machine to pass 
>around angle bracketed Unicode text rather than DOMs or
>SAX event streams do you?  Or do you just object to calling
>it "XML"?

Actually, I do really do want to do that. Within the same process I'm 
content to pass objects, but between different processes, they're  a 
number of advantages to passing real XML. Among them, in ascending 
order of significance:

1. It makes it a lot easier if I decide to split the processes 
between machines.

2. I don't have to worry about unexpected connections between the 
processes because they share memory.

3. The processes may have very different internal data structures. 
For instance, one may represent text as UTF-8 and another as UTF-16 
in their in-memory data structures. Hell one may be using a 
Xerces-Java DOM and the other be using a Microsoft MSXML DOM. DOMs 
are rarely interoperable in practice.

There is no guarantee that the binary formats exported by one process 
make sense ton the next, even on the same architecture. I'm confident 
I can make sense out of XML on both ends. I'm not so sure about 
binary formats.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Typing and paranoia
    • From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
  • Re: Typing and paranoia
    • From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>
  • Re: Typing and paranoia
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

• References:
  • Typing and paranoia
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Re: Typing and paranoia
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

• Prev by Date: Re: Regarding Simon St. Laurent's Article on XLink
• Next by Date: Re: Typing and paranoia
• Previous by thread: Re: Typing and paranoia
• Next by thread: Re: Typing and paranoia
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread