Re: [binaryXML-30] Binary XML problem statement.

At 3:06 PM -0500 2/19/03, Michael Mealling wrote:
>On Wed, 2003-02-19 at 14:20, Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM wrote:

>>  As a somewhat extreme point of comparison, you wouldn't for most purposes
>>  want to represent an IP packet in a format with variable offsets, allowed
>>  whitespace, etc.  IP packets aren't the subject of discussion here, but
>>  many of the existing protocols have similar characteristics.

Absolutely not, which is why I would never suggest using XML for IP 
packets, or a lot of other uses. There are tasks for which binary is 
necessary and appropriate. IP packets are one of them.

>While not quite the proto-typical web services area, there are several
>IETF protocols that would like to use XML that also have these same
>characteristics. In several cases we have requirements that closely
>match DNS's 'network footprint' and server side scalability strengths.

Then may I politely suggests that XML is a not a good fit for your 
needs, and you should use something else? It sounds like the XML 
everywhere meme has gone too far. I like XML for what it is good for 
(and that's a lot of things), but let's not turn it into an Edsel. It 
can't and shouldn't do everything. If you need fixed length fields, 
binary representations, and so forth, then you need something other 
than XML.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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Received on Thursday, 20 February 2003 06:45:35 UTC