Re: "Binary XML" proposals

[Sean McGrath <sean.mcgrath@propylon.com>]

At 13:49 10/04/2001 -0700, David Brownell wrote:
>Basically, every binary RPC protocol I've ever seen has been
>converted, sooner or later, into a conduit for proprietary
>platforms.  Fragmenting a previously-unified (XML=text)
>world by creating a binary variant seems a fine start, for any
>organizations wanting to head that direction.  Large vendors
>can afford the duplicate investments, when they can forsee
>it opens the door to more vendor lock-in.

This is a favourite hobby horse of mine that I wrote about
in SGML for software engineers[1].

Vendors play on one of the programming communities most
pervasive weakness - fixation on speed of execution at the expense
of speed of change & speed of debugging.

Programmer : "Why is it all hidden behind an API with the data
stored in binary?"

Vendor: "Oh, we have to do that for efficiency reasons"

Programmer: "Oh, ok".

Vendor: "[Gotcha!]"

regards,
Sean

[1] Out of print. Written in pre-history. (1997)