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- From: rev-bob@gotc.com
- To: "xml" <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
- Date: 26 Nov 99 06:45:41 -0500
> At 09:42 AM 11/25/99 +0100, Paul Prescod wrote:
> >Cell phones must increasingly deal with structured information.
> >Therefore cell phones need to deal with XML.
>
> Agreed, but that doesn't answer the question of "Why XML?". Why not ASN.1,
> SGML, SML, or a non-standard binary encoded XML that might be more suitable
> over small pipes? The proxy on the last-hop to the cell phone can take
> care of bidirectional conversion, right?
True enough....
> IMHO, that answer only arrives once you realize that this structured
> information isn't restricted to travelling the client/server path and
> always going through that proxy. What if I want to send a web page or
> vCard or whatever to another cell phone via IR or Bluetooth, where there's
> no proxy available? That's where a well-deployed standard matters, and
> *that's* "Why XML?".
Okay, here's the crux of the issue where I'm concerned. A vCard or some other small
fragment, that I can grok in this context - fine. However, I just can't see somebody
reading a web page (or any other document of substantial size) on their cellphone - not
even a fairly short page. It's that whole visual space concern that kicked this thread off
to begin with; I can read a paragraph or so on a palmtop-sized screen without much
trouble, or I can look through a short list, but actual *reading*? Not yet, and so far as I
can tell, not in the next few years. The problem is simply one of being unable to track
complex thoughts on a screen smaller than a playing card and with worse readability.
Rev. Robert L. Hood | http://rev-bob.gotc.com/
Get Off The Cross! | http://www.gotc.com/
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