[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Pushing all the buttons
Bob Foster wrote: >How is it you're going to ensure that X support the method that becomes >popular in Y? How is it than Y is going to be _able_ to support the X >method? (Names changed to protect MS, I mean X.) What prevents them keeping >their method a secret or patenting it? > Nothing. It is up to users to boycott monopolized technologies, and for standards bodies to steer clear of them, just like with any technology. If vendors want to augment the common methods with their own proprietary method that has some advantage, great. As long as the infrastructure supports pluralism (in this case, compression negotiation or content negotiation), it is great if they support proprietary encodings (for data transmission). But when plurality is allowed, the issue of which one to support has a hope of being a technical decision rather than a competitive decision. Data interchange (if that is the purpose of binary infosets) is best served if the lower layers can be altered to taste: buying into a higher layer (e.g. .NET or whatever) should not require you to buy into a whole stack, particular encodings, particular protocols, etc. In the long run, plurality wins because monolithic system and tied stacks become unworkable and unorganic. If your question is code for how can we force Microsoft to support something, I think the answer is obvious merely by posing it directly! Of course we cannot--it is their business (and they claim to be more interested in the upper layers); but what we can do is make sure the standards-based infrastructure supports anyone supporting common protocols when it becomes in their advantage to do so. Big companies can suffer just as much from technological lock-in as small users can; I think it is a mistake to see the arguments for plurality in David-and-Goliath terms. To use my regular analogy here: look at how many great products MS is building on top of W3C XML Schemas, but what happens if the market is bored or scared by them? With big monolithic standards, MS cannot go back and say "These parts are fine but we need a complete revision of these parts quick", both because of the difficulty of updating monolithic standards, and because implementations of monolithic standards may not have been written with a view to modularity; you cannot upgrade it in dribs and drabs. (I wouldn't want to take this too far: obviously schemas for creating PSVIs are different from compression formats in that the former is a gateway to the application while the latter is a gateway to lower layers. ) If the purpose is data archiving in any way, then the tradeoffs change: text is definitely the way to go. Cheers Rick Jelliffe
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