- From: Liam R. E. Quin <liam@fromoldbooks.org>
- Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2022 22:56:22 -0500
- To: Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren.net@gmail.com>, W3C Credentials Community Group <public-credentials@w3.org>
On Thu, 2022-12-15 at 05:19 +0100, Anders Rundgren wrote: > For me it is obvious that developers of new designs should seriously > consider CBOR as an alternative to JSON and XML: > > https://github.com/cyberphone/cbor-everywhere A couple of notes... XML is a format designed not only to interchange information between applications, but also to mediate between human and computer - it can be human-readable and text-editable, especially when used for documents. Consider Docbook, XHTML, JATS, etc. In particular XML has support for 'mixed content", also known as "rich text", such as paragraphs with a mixture of text and markup or formatting. There is a binary format for interchanging XML that uses server-side parsed event streams, so the client doesn't need to do parsing. This can be super efficient, and is also used by IOT devices (as a more efficient alternative to JSON). The format can also use a grammar to reduce entropy - if you know an A is followed by a B and then a C, just transmit the data, not the names. And so on. XML is not, intended for arbitrary binary interchange. It does, however, feature name-based user-defined typing, e.g. "MetricDistanceInMetres" or whatever, via XML Schema. XML is best used when the owners of the information are not the owners of the applications reading it - e.g. authors writing documentation can choose any XML editor, and the documents will work in any application - where JSON is a strong fit for where the application developer controls the format. liam -- Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/ Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/ XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting. Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations: http://www.fromoldbooks.org
Received on Friday, 16 December 2022 03:57:46 UTC