Re: Binary Infosets

At 16:18 02/10/14 +0200, Robin Berjon wrote:
>Martin Duerst wrote:

>>Also, I'm confused because I have seen strong indications
>>from the mobile community that they don't want to go down
>>to the bit level for compression  (WAP binary xml didn't;
>>gzip and friends of course do) because this implies too
>>much processing, but the compression proposals
>>I have seen for SVG mostly go to the bit level (e.g.
>>using a number of bits rather than a byte to indicate
>>the type of an element).
>
>That's interesting, I've received feedback that is the exact opposite (ie 
>people favouring bit-level, irrespective of the domain). I'd be interested 
>in hearing (perhaps off-list) about those other echoes.

Well, binary WAP was that way, and that was done on purpose.
And if you want to use the same data layout on the device as
you got over the wire, and don't want to spend much time
unpacking it, it seems pretty straightforward to get to that
conclusion.

I think some deeper problems of binary infosets may be that:
- Different binary formats address different requirements,
   so one binary infoset may not be enough.
- Compression is an interesting topic with a lot of engineering
   opportunities and tradeoffs, and this has a tendency to lead
   to over-engineering (in other words, you can impress your boss
   or get a PhD if you invent a new compression method, but you'll
   get much less recognition and no PhD if you just say that you
   don't think compression is necessary (I did my PhD in image
   compression :-))

Regards,    Martin.

Received on Wednesday, 16 October 2002 00:22:32 UTC