[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Hostility to "binary XML" (was Re: XML 2004 weblog items?)
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 20:05:54 +0100, Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...> wrote: FWIW, the show-stopper argument in a number of discussions at XML 2004 that I heard against the idea that "XML text is ubiquitous, don't mess with it" was from the wireless people: XML is NOT ubiquitous in our world, because of the excessive bandwidth requirements. Our technical constraints are fundamental and not going away anytime soon, so don't expect Moore's Law to make everything alright the way it has made convenient but inefficient approaches work on the desktop and on the server. On othe other hand, we desperately want the tools and standardization that XML offers, just not that verbose serialization. We could write a standard for our industry, but we want *one* internet, not a wired one and a wireless one." > Is everyone perfectly > happy and comfy with the notion of a W3C-approved binary XML format (I > doubt it)? I doubt it too. I think people have accepted that there is a problem, but there is intense skepticism that a single standard format will cover all (or even 80%) of the requirements. One data point that some people from Microsoft brought up in the Binary XML Town Hall: They have *tried* to come up with one binary serialization that will satisfy even their internal customers, and haven't found one. There is also EXTREME skepticism that a typical W3C design by committee job will come up with anything useful. > Have people given up (on the Life, the Universe, the W3C)? > Does this community trust the XBC WG in its eternal (*cough*) wisdom to > reach the right conclusions? The sense I got from Michael Leventhal's presentation on the XBC was that you are doing the Right Thing. I didn't hear anyone in the audience disagree that this is a very valuable exercise, even if many are convinced that it will ultimately conclude that the (non-wireless?) world is not ready for a single binary XML standard. Most of us would be extremely happy to be proven wrong on that point, if the data are there to back it up. I ended my talk with a *personal* [don't hold any past, present, or future employer responsible!] recommendation "Leave evolution to Darwin, not Berners-Lee". In other words, it's time to experiment, to develop specs that meet the needs of some specific industry, to see if parsing and compression technology for XML text can be dramatically improved .... and THEN to come back with data and best practices in hand to see if W3C Recommendations can be agreed upon.
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