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Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come f

• To: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Subject: Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
• From: Liam Quin <liam@w...>
• Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 11:58:22 -0500
• Cc: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>,XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <42078C55.2000607@m...>
• References: <Pine.LNX.4.44L0.0501280904130.20504-100000@s...> <e3a5cb2c05020609516779e7d6@m...> <6fa681b1050206105274c18b2b@m...> <200502072203.32140.david.lyon@c...> <e3a5cb2c0502070525d70b839@m...> <42076ED7.2070408@e...> <4207792E.4040402@m...> <42077DF2.6080708@e...> <42078C55.2000607@m...>
• User-agent: Mutt/1.5.6+20040907i

On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 10:42:13AM -0500, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Binary file formats are *broken*

Hence the failure of
TCP
IP
GIF
PNG
JPEG
MPEG 3 (mp3)
OGG
ZIP
gzip
PPP
PDF
EXE
etc etc :-)

> Introducing @ and $ and other currently unreserved punctuation 
> characters as new reserved symbols is *broken*
Hence the failure of email?

What's broken is using closed (trade-secret) formats.  There are lots
of uses for non-textual formats.  And yes, making inspection easy is
very helpful for wide adoption, and one way to do that is to use a
format for which most people alerady have inspection tools, such as
when we choose a format that uses a sequence of numbers to represent
characters and text.  But even a "plain US ASCII text file" is in fact
in a binary format.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
    • From: Amelia A Lewis <amyzing@t...>

• References:
  • Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
    • From: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
    • From: Kurt Cagle <kurt.cagle@g...>
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  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" myth come from?
    • From: Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@g...>
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
    • From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
    • From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
    • From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>

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