[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Protocol Buffers - Why not use XML

• From: "Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@w3.org>
• To: ihe.onwuka@gmail.com, "xml-dev@l..." <xml-dev@l...>
• Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2016 05:41:10 +0100

On Mon, 2016-02-08 at 20:52 -0500, Ihe Onwuka wrote:
> Can anybody express an informed opinion to the question in the
> subject
> which was culled from the Protocol Buffer Google Developer Guide.
> 
> https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview as the
> ones
> written seem to have  an XML phobic slant.

Well, they're right that there has been some hugely over-engineered
stuff done with XML, and also right that XML has some features that
make data binding difficult (e.g. mixed content, and the way namespace
attributes can come interspersed with other attributes in any order).

It turns out that EXI may be slightly more efficient than Protocol
Buffers -- I say may because compression always varies, and the
measurements didn't show a ten-fold improvement or better. With EXI
what goes over the wire is essentially a series of parse events rather
than compressed XML.

But the Enterprise XML people (Web Services) and the "XML is to replace
HTML" people managed to scare away a lot of potential XML users who had
not already run screaming at the tediousness of tree manipulation with
the XML DOM.

I'm open to suggestions for making XML cool to teenagers :-) Our sweet
spot was and remains encoding, archiving, interchange & processing of
complex documents, though. Which is plenty cool to a lot of us :D

Liam

-- 
Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org>
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

• References:
  • Protocol Buffers - Why not use XML
    • From: Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka@gmail.com>