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Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome fr

• To: Rich Salz <rsalz@d...>
• Subject: Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
• From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Tue, 08 Feb 2005 11:18:16 -0500
• Cc: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>, XML Developers List <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <Pine.LNX.4.44L0.0502080817300.12704-100000@s...>
• References: <Pine.LNX.4.44L0.0502080817300.12704-100000@s...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217

Rich Salz wrote:


> Let's ignore the Infoset.  But if we posit
> 	XML --> a binary serialization --> XML
> 
> how does that atively damage the XML community?

First, you have to realize that most binary proposals to not in fact 
posit that. They either superset or subset or only intersect with 
regular XML. But if we rule all those formats out, there are still problems:

1. Patents are beginning to invade this space, closing off 
interoperability and open software.

2. The data that's transmitted in this binary format is less inspectable 
than data in the regular XML format.

3. Software vendors will publish tools that only consume the binary 
data; and therefore systems will refuse to accept the textual data.

4. Binary parsers often forgo well-formedness checks such as name 
characters that textual parsers make. They incorrectly assume that 
nobody can or will inject broken data into the system.

These problems are not insurmountable, but once you surmount them you're 
very close to reinventing real XML, and being about as fast and maybe 
marginally slower.

Anyway, that's just four issues. But really this is a moot point. The 
vast majority of proposals do not provide bijections between real XML 
and their custom format. Many add pieces. Almost all remove pieces they 
don't consider relevant be that white space or document type 
declarations or element order or mixed content or something else. There 
are several well-supported, well-understood, small binary formats for 
XML already. They're called .xml.gz, .xml.zip, .xml.bz2 and so forth. 
Just about anything more XML aware than these, though, is unlikely to be 
bijective.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@m...
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

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    • From: Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...>
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    • From: Rich Salz <rsalz@d...>

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  • Re: Re: Where does the "nothing left but toolkits" mythcome from?
    • From: Rich Salz <rsalz@d...>

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