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Re: The Rising Sun: How XML Binary Restored the Fortunesof Inn


inn xml
The problem is difficult, but it is not impossible to solve.  Many 
people have come up with pieces of the solution and some of us think we 
see a solution package that is flexible enough to handle such disparate 
cases.

Everyone understands that XML and XML+gzip are suitable for different, 
overlapping use cases.  In a sense, document analysis-based compression 
is an optional feature of "XML with optional gzip".  Similarly, it is 
possible for other methods to be used in an incremental way, possibly 
changing in mix on an element by element basis.  In this way, you can 
unify something obvious like a TLV (token, length, value,or for elements 
and attributes, token, name, length, value) with what I generalize as 
"externalization" of structure and metadata for something similar to 
ASN.1+PER (or XML Schema->ASN.1->PER+).  (Note that I am not an advocate 
of ASN.1 anything and I'm not specifically an adovcate of XML Schema for 
the One True externalization method.)  TLV, or rather TNLV, is 
self-describing and can be completely equivalent to XML 1.x text 
encoding.  A completely externalized, and therefore able to be most 
compact, mode is less XML-like unless you consider the out of band "XML 
completing" metadata/metastructure as a kind of compression of the 
instance.  This seems like a unifying concept and makes it reasonable to 
think that you could have a format that supports an arbitrary mix as 
needed and maintain equivalence to text-based XML.

I strongly believe that we need the ability to have a completely 
self-contained instance with equivalence to XML 1.x, but I also see a 
clean way to also support various externalization and compactness 
techniques to approach absolute compactness when desired.  I've publicly 
mentioned the idea of a metastructure descriptor instance as a new take 
on externalization.  I'll publish more about it soon.

sdw

Michael Champion wrote:

> ...
>
>
>I do think that the burden of proof is on those who would break things
>that actually work without compelling evidence that would make us much
>better off down the road. To be fair to the XBC people,  until we
>really and truly see XML 1.0 working for the use cases that they laid
>out, I'm planning to keep an open mind about how to make the XML
>family of technologies work better for all the users and potential
>users.  For now, various "binary XML" technologies definitely have
>their place in specialized domains and scenarios, but nobody has come
>anywhere near demonstrating that a "binary XML" standard would do more
>good than harm.  For that matter, I don't see how it is plausible to
>believe that a consensus can be reached on a  format that trades off
>the needs of the wireless people for cheap compression and the needs
>of the enterprise messaging people for processing speed.
>
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-- 
swilliams@h... http://www.hpti.com Per: sdw@l... http://sdw.st
Stephen D. Williams 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax 20147-4622 AIM: sdw


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