Re: almost four years ago....

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

On Sat, 16 Jun 2001, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
[xml p-code]
> Actually this has been invented many times already. It seems to be 
> invented roughly once every two months. It's proven completely 
> pointless in practice. There is no actual benefit to it, and no one 
> needs it. Worse yet, it substantially eliminates many of the existing 
> benefits of XML. There seems to be a large group of programmers who 
> mistakenly believe:
> 
> 1. File size matters.
> 2. They can compress better than gzip.
> 3. Human legible/human editable data doesn't matter.
> 
> All three beliefs have been empirically proven false time and time again.

For reinventing wheels, certainly. But outside the USA, where net
access costs real money and line speeds are often limited, size
does matter...a lot.

Store the master in XML...but deliver in a form suited to your
customers' needs, and if that means gzipped .dvi files dervied
from the master source, so be it. 

It's still risky to assume that every Internet user has a 1GHz
machine with limitless disk space on a T1 connection.

///Peter