Re: binaryXML, marshalling, and and trust boundaries

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

/ Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> was heard to say:
| Another approach would be to define a custom binary format for the
| needs of your application and provide a canonical mapping to a
| well-defined format for purposes of interchange outside the
| application.

That's the answer that seems most logical to me. (But I imagine that
you thought of it and rejected it. Why?)

If your messages are all short and well understood, you can simply
catalog them and define their binary encoding and their XML
serialization.

I do this routinely with my Palm. I get XML out of my sync tool and
for all intents and purposes on my desktop, the Palm databases are
XML. But of course, they aren't, and I just slap them back into
"binary" when I sync them.

If the Palm application allowed extensibility, this wouldn't work and
it'd be a really bad answer. Likewise, if you were allowing foreign
namespaces or other extensibility mechanisms in your messages, I
wouldn't like the "encode it as binary" solution. But you aren't,
so...

| Because it's not obvious that XML is well-suited to the
| needs of the application you describe. -Tim

Yep. It's a really, really nice hammer. But sometimes you need a
screwdriver.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM    | A moment's insight is sometimes worth a
XML Standards Architect | life's experience.--Oliver Wendell Holmes
Web Tech. and Standards |
Sun Microsystems, Inc.  | 
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.7 <http://mailcrypt.sourceforge.net/>

iD8DBQE97QSJOyltUcwYWjsRApI2AKCPOmTF04XNJoWhECx8j4iZYuvDvACgorur
fnEK0QDaf7Przw6vZb01TpY=
=vWRg
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Received on Tuesday, 3 December 2002 14:24:18 UTC