RE: Images embedded in XML

[Andy Greener <andy@gid.co.uk>]

Danny Ayers writes:

><- Hmmm, it'd be nice if XML was more compact, faster to parse, and let you
><- embed other data streams more easily - do we *have* to make it
><- human-readable UTF-8?
>
>It wouldn't be extensible or markup - I suppose you could just call it 'L'

:-))

BCPL spawned the B language, which gave rise to C, which gave rise to C++
(should've been 'P' :-)... I was wondering when 'L' was going to appear ;-)

>
>  Surely a binary format would be much
><- better if there
><- were good tools easily available to hand-edit it?
>
>There's nothing stopping anyone using binary formats, there are thousands in
>use. Hand editing along with visual representation is one thing, machine
>generation and reading another.

Quite. Using binary to make things more compact just lands you with a whole
lot of compatibility issues like word size, big-endian vs little-endian byte
ordering, padding, etc. Messy. I'd rather be able to see what's going on,
and anyway, compression techniques get you all the compaction you need
without obfuscating the data representation.

-- 

Andy Greener                         Mob: +44 7836 331933
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