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Mike Champion wrote:
> I would totally agree that either
> calling an alternative "XML" without qualification would be stupid, but
> presumably this is a problem that HTTP content negotiation could handle
> easily if someone offered an alternative *standardized* "XML" serialization
> on their website.
And does. A specification I worked on recently uses SOAP, and mandates the HTTP
binding with content-negotiation (I wish the official SOAP HTTP binding would do
that as well...). They wished to transmit binary infosets optionally, and
mandated XML for interoperability. This is not a closed system, on the contrary
it's a very open one. Selecting between either option is a trivial matter of
setting the correct Accept-Encoding/Content-Encoding, and it has shown to work
very smoothly.
> I see several scenarios for the future: One is that the alternatives become
> moot -- Office 11 makes XML GUI authoring ubiquitous, and Moore's Law makes
> the bandwidth and performance issues associated with the XML 1.x syntax
> trivial.
That could very well happen eventually, but unfortunately, barring a revolution
it won't be the case before at least a few years.
> Two is to legitimize the infoset- centric view of "XML" and have a
> manageable number of alternative syntaxes (with MIME registrations, etc. etc.
> to keep the Web sane). Three is that people take option 2 without the
> blessing of the W3C, simply because they can't afford the overhead of the
> unicode tags, etc. in their constrained or high-performance environments, and
> we have real chaos.
2003 is to see several consortia start ratifying binary infosets, some of them
might end up being home-grown. This wasn't obvious to me before I started
delving into the topic, but I'm seriously concerned that chaos isn't very far away.
> People here seem to believe that Gates and Moore will save our butts :-)
> That's not the impression I get on web services-oriented and
> middleware-oriented developers, but I don't have enough first hand knowledge
> to judge.
It's not the impression I get from mobile, broadcast, and embedded orientated
developers either.
--
Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
Research Engineer, Expway
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