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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: SAX for Binary Encodings (SAD-SAX)
 On Sat, Nov 08, 2003 at 12:37:15PM -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote: > At 11:22 AM -0500 11/8/03, Bob Wyman wrote: [...] > You are proposing to add binary data to the core of XML. When you > tell me that you want to pass 32-bit integers as pure binary, then > you are saying that 7, 07, +07, 0007, and so forth are the same > thing. This is of course absurd. If you choose to pass the string "007" then any interchange encoding worth its salt will transmit "007". If you choose to pass the typed value "integer: 7" then any interchange encoding worth its salt will transmit that value, possibly using as few as 3 or 4 bits. > All data in an XML document is text, never anything else. All data in a textual XML document is *represented* as text. But that text often represents non-textual value. The value of the textual representation is that it is shared, not that it limits all possible data to text. Happily, I can refer to dates, to amounts of money, to places, to distances, to the colour of my socks, or to the strange feeling of dislocation I had when I awoke from a dream last night. None of these things are text, and yet you are reading them in this textual email message. It's interesting that there was similar opposition to MIME, since all email was text, and yet MIME is part of what enabled the World Wide Web, and is what lets people send each other email attachments such as viruses :-) The idea that we interchange text is, however, a fiction at another level: as far as the computer is concerned, we interchange sequences of numbers. Typically these are sequences of octets of binary digits, although there have been (and probably still are) systems that use other models. When you say that only one view of a layered architecture is acceptable, you succumb, I claim, to the hubris of the dogmatic. WHen you say that your particular viewpoint is the only one acceptable for others, you go beyond the dogmatic to the didactic. It might be that interchange of binary information in any non-textual representation is not a change we should sanction at the W3C (although that will not stop others from doing it), but at least let us all make a decision based on careful and clear reasoning, and let that reasoning use reproducible measurements wherever possible as a basis, not mere dogma. Liam -- Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ 
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