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On Thursday 05 December 2002 20:25, Mike Champion wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Dec 2002 14:44:55 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold
> <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
>
> wrote:
> > There is no guarantee that the binary formats exported by one process
> > make sense ton the next, even on the same architecture. I'm confident I
> > can make sense out of XML on both ends. I'm not so sure about binary
> > formats.
>
> In my mind, "binary" is a bit of a misnomer and red herring. The issue
> is Infoset serializations that are optimized for something or other ...
> parsing speed, compactness, authorability, etc. etc. etc. How they
> handle non-text data (in a native binary format, in a compressed
> text format, or in a more compact markup format than XML's) is
> an open question.
I agree. Bear in mind that Unicode is a binary format for strings of
characters, JPEG and GIF and PNG and ZIP and TCP and DNS and IP and FAT and
executable code and EXT2FS and UFS and so on are all also binary formats that
do not have any of these problems people here associate with binary stuff!
ABS
--
A city is like a large, complex, rabbit
- ARP
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