Re: binaryXML, marshalling, and and trust boundaries

At 11:46 02/12/05 -0500, Michael Mealling wrote:

>On Mon, 2002-12-02 at 22:26, Tim Bray wrote:

> > BTW, does WBXML as it stands meet your needs?
>
>As far as I can tell, yes. The reason I'm asking this question is that
>there is a large amount of FUD out there about WBXML that I can't seem
>to get any real answers for. Is that FUD justified? Is there some
>incompatibility problem with it that I'm not aware of? If the FUD is
>just limited to the "binary XML is a bad idea" realm then that I can
>successfully deal with. I've just heard no definitive documentation
>about the applicability of WBXML. Maybe an applicability statement from
>the TAG about when something like WBXML is appropriate and what the
>drawbacks were would be more appropriate than a simple 'pshaw'.

'WBXML' and 'something like WBXML' are not exactly the same.
Some real arguments against wbxml may only be fud against something
similar to wbxml.

Two particular areas come to my mind where this is relevant:

- WBXML encodes elements and attributes with numbers. To know
   what these numbers are, you need to go somewhere. This needs
   a registry. WBXML defines that WAP controls that registry.

   Most of this could be fixed easily, at the expense of some
   less compression.

- For the compression of content (as opposed to markup) WBXML
   uses a dictionary of common strings that is sent at the
   beginning of an encoded document. This means: 1) For good
   compression, the whole XML document has to be read and
   processed before output can start. 2) For a document that
   is best compressed with a large dictionary, it may take
   a long time to read the dictionary and get to the start
   of the actual document.

   This of course can also be fixed, again at the cost of
   somewhat lower compression.

Regards,    Martin.

Received on Thursday, 5 December 2002 18:03:16 UTC