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

At 7:47 AM -0500 2/20/03, Michael Mealling wrote:

>We looked at just about everything we could find. ASN.1 had its typical
>problems with encapsulation of unkown data types. Most of the other were
>to simplistic since we had to deal with things such as limited use of
>namespaces, encodings, schemas, etc. In other words, to handle the
>applications we're after we would've ended up creating something almost
>exactly like XML 1.0 in a binary form, just not called XML. That
>would've been a rather silly thing to do given perfectly reasonable
>solutions that already exist.

Actually, that's exactly what you should have done. You could have 
created the right technology for your needs, without impacting anyone 
else who didn't need it. If it happened to look a lot like XML, no 
big deal.

>I find it much more productive to start with something that solves all
>of the required problems except one and fix that rather than throw out a
>perfectly good solution and build one from scratch. For now I've decided
>to use WBXML since its about as good as you can get for our application.
>But if the W3C were to come up with a better or more accepted standard
>we would use that (if it solved the problem, of course. gzip doesn't).

The problem is that this so-called binary XML may save you time, but 
it pollutes the space for the rest of us. Maybe it's a net-gain for 
your project. It's a net loss for the community, though.

-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
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Received on Thursday, 20 February 2003 09:03:28 UTC