Re: "Binary XML" proposals

["Anders W. Tell" <opensource@toolsmiths.se>]

Amy Lewis wrote:

> Why is this a hack?  Large amounts of XML contain large amounts of
> text; it's hard to imagine a binary encoding of document-oriented XML
> achieving any real benefits.  A sufficiently advanced encoding scheme,
> such as BER for ASN.1, ultimately yields great pain in the programmer
> (apologies to Olivier and the others who enjoy it ... I had to write
> the protocol decodes with fairly hard real-time constraints, and I
> *hated* it).  Or XDR for RPC ... I'll have nightmares, I'm sure, with
> the memory returned now.

ASN1 is a good standard but difficult to use and there its is possible to write
much "simpler" parsers ANS 1 ones.

>
>
> Why?  Why is it nicer to stuff binary into XML (which is specifically
> designed for text transmission), than to create a container meta format
> to transport XML + binary?

Well, in SOAP there are MIME support, which is used as transport for
ebXML messages.

I Think both approaches are desirable.

/anders