Re: The relentless march of abstraction (fwd)

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Tim Bray wrote:

> At 11:41 AM 27/02/01 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
> 
> >I think that client-side XML failed simply because it didn't fill a
> >big enough real need (HTML 4 is close enough)
> 
> I have a problem with your verb tense.  The web is still too slow.
> Fatter pipes aren't going to help.  The only way to make it fast
> is to do some of the work on the (severely underemployed, these
> days) client, and the only way to do that is to send some useful
> data there to get chewed on.  So I think client-side XML just
> hasn't got going yet.  To say it had failed, it would be 
> necessary for it to have been tried. -Tim

Are you behind a 9600 connection? I have a modem you can have if you are
:-)

Seriously though, I haven't found the web too slow as far as *text
content* goes for a few years now, in fact since 28K modems became the
benchmark. The only slow thing now is still images, and I don't see XML in
the browser really helping that. I'd far rather see people use a standard
that we have had available to us since January 1997 - gzip encoding
(<plug>AxKit does gzip encoding automatically on transformed
content :-)</plug>)

-- 
<Matt/>

    /||    ** Founder and CTO  **  **   http://axkit.com/     **
   //||    **  AxKit.com Ltd   **  ** XML Application Serving **
  // ||    ** http://axkit.org **  ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP  **
 // \\| // ** mod_perl news and resources: http://take23.org  **
     \\//
     //\\
    //  \\