RE: "Binary XML" proposals

["Timothy J. Luoma" <tjlists@bigfoot.com>]

> > P.S.  I agree wholeheartedly with Tim Bray and Sean
> >       McGrath's posts.  Binary XML is dead on arrival.
> >       Getting away from binary formats is the _entire_
> >       reason for XML.  Being able to audit your
> >       inputs and outputs.
>
> Why do people think standardised binary formats can't be audited? Haven't
> they ever used a *filesystem*, a zip file, an image viewer, or any other
> freely available and ubiquitous binary file format viewer before?

This may be speaking out of ignorance,
but isn't the issue here the "1 to 1" (or close to it) correlation between what
you can see in Notepad, etc and the actual file?

If I have an image file or a .zip file that reports itself to be corrupted, I'm
in trouble.

If I have a web page that displays incorrectly, I can go in and see the
underlying "code" directly.... and while I could open my .zip file in a text
editor, it isn't likely that I'm going to know how to fix it.

A filesystem error is fixed by fsck, not by vi (at least here!).

That seemed to be the difference in what they were saying wrt being able to
audit.... but perhaps I have a misunderstanding.

TjL